Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications? • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by cc101 » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

newaccount74 wrote: post #303

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…

What did the 850 free users say about the app? If only a dozen people bought licenses, then something must be wrong. My app didn't really sell well in the first two years either -- it took a lot of changes until it was actually something that people wanted to buy, and I had to throw out some of my favorite features because folks just didn't understand them. Just from reading your post, I suspect the app is too specif…

Sigh! I got only one comment. I'd love to get more comments.

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

#332

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 5:17 PM UTC

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #147

Yes, but the desktop computer is typically attached to a $250k piece of custom industrial automation, the fact that there's 200 hours of C# programming for the HMI/ERP client/label printer/data logger is irrelevant to the customer, it's just a line item next to the PLC/robot programming, raw materials, welding, fabrication, wiring etc. Add some Beckhoff, Siemens or (yuck) Rockwell capacity to your stack - buy a used…

Thanks for posting this.

I have a background in embedded and a couple years ago I built a custom Windows GUI for an Advanced Motion Controls based motion system as a freelance project.

Until your post, I totally forgot that I have a Kollmorgen AKD control with a servomotor in my basement. A customer had sent it to me so I could test some custom hardware I designed for them and I always wanted to see if I could integrate it into my GUI project, but got so busy I completely forgot it was there.

Time to dust off the hardware...

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

#333

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #242

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm answering in terms of what I know best. I, personally, don't see the point of supporting non-Windows desktops. User base isn't large enough for me to bother.

my cross-platform DAW, Ardour, has as many Linux downloads as Windows downloads (on the order of 5k per month). Is it the DAW niche? Or are you possibly wrong about this?

It's always going to be application-specific. In my case, the kind of software I'm likely to write is going to have a majority-Windows user base, at least in the US.

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

#334

Post by throwaway204401 » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

magicalhippo wrote: post #236

throwaway204401 wrote: post #70

We sell a desktop app with an involvement in dev and support of about 0.25-0.50 FTE, with revenues in the range of $50K/month although it was launched 9 years ago and the first year was only about $2K/month. The server side is just one Windows 4GB server for user signups, billing and license validation. One good thing of desktop apps is that the server side is so cheap, you are basically selling IP. It has this featu…

> * B2B in a niche market > * Some viral component so you do not have to spend money on ads for growth. Indeed. For years our sales department was simply our customers. They'd call their friends and tell them they need to get our software, or when they switched jobs they'd work hard to get our software used at the new place. Now we have a small but proper sales team. However word of mouth got us very, very far. > * S…

> Now we have a small but proper sales team. However word of mouth got us very, very far.

Note that viral is not the same thing as word of mouth. Viral means that one user expressly or subliminally forces other users to use that software.

For example, a customer asking or encouraging a vendor to use some specific software because it makes things easier for the customer and later, when that vendor is also infected with the need, they ask or encourage their own vendors to use that software too.

This is the distribution mechanism that we have for our tool.

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

#335

Post by asfarley » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

ezekg wrote: post #103

eps wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: payments - it depends on the country, but generally Stripe + PayPal + bank wires for larger/enterprise purchases. Alternatively, Braintree. An altogether different option is to pay 2x the commission and use "full-service" reseller frontends like Digital River, PayProGlobal, etc. These are referred to as "registrators" and they used to be useful, because getting a merchant account and processing cards was a royal…

> There are some drop-in solutions for this, but all of them are really quite basic and almost universally suck. However, the good news is that is fairly simple to roll out your own online licensing scheme in a matter of few work-days (assuming you know a bit of web backend and frontend). I wouldn't say all of them suck. But that's because I built one [0] for the sole reason that, back in 2016, I too thought all of o…

If you’re the developer, I repeatedly tried to contact you to ask some questions. Since i never heard back, and I didn’t like the other options, I too ended up rolling my own.

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

#336

Post by rurban » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 6:00 PM UTC

Unfortunately yes, currently. I left the sad state of native desktop apps 15 years ago, but we are now contracting for a medical app, windows of course. But, the new thing: also Linux!! armv7 firmware running the very same code as on windows.

But only temporary. All the other contracting jobs and internal projects are Linux or baremetal firmware only.

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

#337

Post by em-bee » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 6:06 PM UTC

hogrider wrote: post #327

c_ma_gee wrote: post #326

We (an elementary teacher and a computer scientist) are helping migrant children without any knowledge of the german language to learn it easily and give elementary teachers much more time and improve the quality of their lessons dramaticaly with a desktop application for learning the german language and various perfect fitting supplementary materials. Often, german elementary teachers are facing the following situat…

Pardon my ignorance but isn't it a huge mistake to place non german speaking children in these classes? They just hope they'll pick it up along the way? Isn't it throwing them to the wolves?

there aren't really many other options. having separate schools for migrants would make it difficult for the children to integrate into the local society, but integration is seen as critical for everyone to get along.

immersion into the target language environment is also the most effective way for kids to learn a new language. they will make friends with native speakers, and that will only help their language learning.

in elementary school there is also less focus on academic performance

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

#338

Post by ezekg » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 6:46 PM UTC

asfarley wrote: post #335

ezekg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are some drop-in solutions for this, but all of them are really quite basic and almost universally suck. However, the good news is that is fairly simple to roll out your own online licensing scheme in a matter of few work-days (assuming you know a bit of web backend and frontend). I wouldn't say all of them suck. But that's because I built one [0] for the sole reason that, back in 2016, I too thought all of o…

If you’re the developer, I repeatedly tried to contact you to ask some questions. Since i never heard back, and I didn’t like the other options, I too ended up rolling my own.

I am. That’s very atypical for my support, and I sincerely apologize for that. Searching for your emails landed me in early 2020. And it looks like I forgot to respond to you. That was a busy time. After 4 years, I was in the process of quitting my full-time job to go full-time on Keygen, and I was in the middle of moving all support from Intercom to email. So my email was kind of flooded and I often forgot to respond to some discovery emails. It’s no excuse, but I figured I’d share. Again, sorry for the poor experience.

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

#339

Post by cc101 » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 7:07 PM UTC

jspann wrote: post #260

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…

First off, congrats on getting your idea out into a tangible product. Many people come up with ideas, even fewer take time, or have the skills, to try to actually build them, but you put in time and effort that made it to the end goal of putting it on the App Store. Not everyone makes it that far so congratulations on doing so. I took a look because, as a current student, I often have to write research papers and tag…

Thanks for your kind words.

In response to your comments, I reduced the price to $9.99. I'll make it clear that there is a money back guarantee for all apps in the App Store.

The other suggestions I take very seriously. I will implement them, but this will take time. Several weeks probably.

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

#340

Post by ddingus » Sat, Jan 22, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

huhtenberg wrote: post #300

franga2000 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if it was your specific software, but I recently filmed a promo for a local dentist who was demonstrating this exact tech and I was blown away by how quick and accurate those scanner sticks are and how well the software stitched it in real time. How the hell can you scan something as small, wet and soft as the inside of a person's mouth and stitch it all perfectly? Seems like the absolute worst environment f…

> I was blown away by how quick and accurate those scanner sticks are Damn, you weren't kidding - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AA4IWd3Svm0 Very impressive indeed. Looks effortless and natural, but I'm sure that the processing engine is not exactly trivial.

WOW! Was just reading along, idle on a slow day and hit this.

The processing on that to achieve such a low latency is amazing, flat out.

Fun watch.