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Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#271

Post by foepys »

tasogare wrote: post #262
ryandrake wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I develop a hobby project targeting desktop Mac (Objective C GUI, C++ business logic) and I’m not sure what Windows technology I should use should I ever decide to port to Windows. There are so many and they are all in various stages of unsupported. C#? C++? .NET? Win32? MFC? WPF? XAML? WinForms? UWP? Maybe just give up on trying to read the future and use Qt. Fucking madness!

C# on .net 6.0 with either WinForms or WPF.

Do not use WPF. WPF is dead. If you don't want to use WinUI, go with WinForms.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#272

Post by clangy »

cc101 wrote: post #257

I'm glad someone is making money. I'm not. I spent 5 years writing a unified workflow for folks writing a research paper/thesis/dissertation (Epiphany Workflow, Apple's App Store). It begins with collecting ideas from websites and files, moves the ideas into an outliner, then supports organizing relevant ideas according to a report outline, and finally, supports reviewing relevant ideas while the user writes each sec…

Just fyi, I'm in Australia and can't view your software in the App Store as it's not available in my region. Not sure if the region locking is deliberate, but perhaps that's part of the reason that sales aren't taking off.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#274

Post by sgc »

semireg wrote: post #128
smoldesu wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't yet support Linux because out of thousands of users, only 2 people have emailed about Linux support (probably both from HN!). I'm a little surprised to read this from an Electron dev. I remember reading old forum posts about how the Spotify port for Linux was arranged by two devs who met after work for a few hours and got it working well enough that Spotify let them release it as an unsupported client. Ther…

I am definitely part grumpy old neck-beard, which is why I offer one-time licenses and an experience that lets a user run 100% offline/air-gapped. You can register and license a computer that is only accessible via USB thumb-drive. If nothing changes on that computer, then the app should continue to run "forever." Second, auto-update is disabled by default because I don't want a dumb bug on my side to break someone's…

Back in the day I did not autostart the installer when someone put a cd in, because that always pissed me off. A lot of emails on that one!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#275

Post by divbzero »

zupo wrote: post #93

After 15 years of SaaS-ing, myself and two collegues, everyone part-time, are trying to see if we can make a profitable macOS app: https://paretosecurity.com/ . Revenue in last 30 days is $3000+, we started working on it back in July. So, it's something? That said, long-term, we expect to earn more from subscriptions for businesses, than we do from single-user lifetime licenses. But again, ATM, it's the single user l…

I’m curious about the Setapp subscription option which is new to me. What was the process for joining the Setapp portfolio of apps and how is the subscription revenue distributed? Do you expect it to become a significant part of your revenue compared to one-time licenses or business subscriptions?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#276

Post by tonyedgecombe »

semireg wrote: post #124
chrisandchris wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks quite cool. Sadly no Linux support, but I get why (got to build a printing library for Brother p-touch once). However, I was about 5 minutes on your site and could not find a list of compatible printers. Where did you hide it :) ?

Sorry, it's right here: https://label.live/printers

Are you writing drivers for all these printers? Will the operating system printer drivers not suffice?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#277

Post by tonyedgecombe »

vborovikov wrote: post #273
foepys wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do not use WPF. WPF is dead. If you don't want to use WinUI, go with WinForms.

WPF isn't dead, it's done.

It's never looked finished to me, it was abandoned at birth.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#278

Post by tonyedgecombe »

COGlory wrote: post #267
cc101 wrote: post #257

I'm glad someone is making money. I'm not. I spent 5 years writing a unified workflow for folks writing a research paper/thesis/dissertation (Epiphany Workflow, Apple's App Store). It begins with collecting ideas from websites and files, moves the ideas into an outliner, then supports organizing relevant ideas according to a report outline, and finally, supports reviewing relevant ideas while the user writes each sec…

This looks really cool. I'm not the target audience (no mac) but definitely don't give up yet.

>definitely don't give up yet.

After five years with no sales?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#280

Post by dep_b »

grujicd wrote: post #116

I'm making Windows/.Net based app for managing queues - QueueExplorer. Started with MSMQ support back in 2005, now it supports Azure Service Bus, RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ. It's old fashioned perpetual licensing, so revenue is a rollercoaster. Because of that, it's emotional rollercoaster as well. Good thing is you get paid for full license at the time of purchase instead of collecting it in 10-20 months. Bad thing is ev…

Converted a simple WinForms app for scanning and reordering medications using Xamarin Mac and storyboards. It was relatively painless.
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