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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?

#41

Post by ramoz »

ramoz wrote: post #36

Also interested in folks doing this for their enterprise market and any available analysis on how to approach that market. My perspective is Enterprise is hard to hit with SaaS. It's also hard to build an integrated (AD/Network/Data/Files) desktop solution. It still seems more viable to start with a standalone, offline, Desktop solution that individual enterprise employees might consider trying / e.g. something like…

For reference I'm taking my shot with https://github.com/wailsapp/wails (webview2 supported on Windows) and https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js for a PDF processing related use case.

Wails because I imagine extensive Golang based services (preference/experience) in any cloud env. .NET would be my other approach for O365 based integrations.

Rust has something similar to wails, https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri . Then there all the traditional native vs cross-platform methods.

No approach, or cross platform framework, really seem quite right. But I figure time and money would be the important factors in any serious avenue I want to take things.

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

#42

Post by anonymouse008 »

ramoz wrote: post #36

Also interested in folks doing this for their enterprise market and any available analysis on how to approach that market. My perspective is Enterprise is hard to hit with SaaS. It's also hard to build an integrated (AD/Network/Data/Files) desktop solution. It still seems more viable to start with a standalone, offline, Desktop solution that individual enterprise employees might consider trying / e.g. something like…

> It still seems more viable to start with a standalone, offline, Desktop solution that individual enterprise employees might consider trying / e.g. something like an app that replaces excel with better efficiencies. Maybe while building some SaaS-like component (advanced processing in cloud, API integrations, etc) that still opens the door for non-enterprise users.

This is currently my approach -- not making a living (yet hopefully) -- but will report back soon. I have a baddie of a productivity tool that can fragment features to a few pay per use web APIs that I'll package with a front end for non-enterprise.

A slight tangent: It's very, very challenging to enable collaboration in these types of environments. Magic Wormhole [0] has been an interesting solution I've wanted to integrate, but haven't yet.

[0] https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

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

#43

Post by andai »

pavlov wrote: post #21
jventura wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but what kind of business niche would that be? You can also touch a lot of files on a webserver, although it would be a pain to upload them.

Sure, a lot of people keep their stuff on somebody else's servers — a.k.a. the cloud — but there are still users who have plenty of local files: music, photos, code... That's a wide range of users, so I don't have a specific product idea, but seems like some kind of opportunity may exist in this niche. (If I had a product idea, I'd probably try making it myself — native desktop apps are much more fun to make than web…

>native desktop apps are much more fun to make than web

This has also been my experience, and I am curious what the reasons are. Does it have to do with the quality of the end result, or the process of development?

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

#44

Post by anonymouse008 »

ramoz wrote: post #41
ramoz wrote: post #36

Also interested in folks doing this for their enterprise market and any available analysis on how to approach that market. My perspective is Enterprise is hard to hit with SaaS. It's also hard to build an integrated (AD/Network/Data/Files) desktop solution. It still seems more viable to start with a standalone, offline, Desktop solution that individual enterprise employees might consider trying / e.g. something like…

For reference I'm taking my shot with https://github.com/wailsapp/wails (webview2 supported on Windows) and https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js for a PDF processing related use case. Wails because I imagine extensive Golang based services (preference/experience) in any cloud env. .NET would be my other approach for O365 based integrations. Rust has something similar to wails, https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri . Then…

ha, I'm doing the same on Mac! Reach out, maybe my (hopefully portable) backend/pdf module could help!

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

#45

Post by jrockway »

high_byte wrote: post #2

desktop does not imply "not SaaS". I'll add that today most desktop apps are headless Chrome. that being said, I actually do web, but were I to go desktop I would look for a niche that can't be done in browser, even though today you already got access to most APIs & hardware...

I agree with that. Things like Fusion 360 are both desktop apps and SaaS. The desktop app checks that you have a subscription before it will let you use it, and various cloud things nobody wants are forced in. (Photoshop has a similar business model, now that I think about. Everyone wants to be a cloud storage provider instead of just taking money in exchange for a piece of software.)

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

#46

Post by pvarangot »

sitzkrieg wrote: post #37

I used to until recently. A LOT of active trading software is still traditional desktop applications for various reason and a decent niche. heavy simulation software is another

I'll add music making software. I don't make it but it's been my only hobby since the pandemic started and I shelled some money on desktop apps that can easily be coded and maintained by a single dev, like librarian software for hardware synths and some VSTs to use in Ableton.

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

#47

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

makz wrote: post #33

Related question. How to start to develop desktop applications? In contrast to web applications there are not many resources out there and most seem outdated.

Download Visual Studio Community Edition and go to New Project -> WPF project and start learning C#.

That's probably the path forward with the best chance of overall success.

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

#48

Post by anotheryou »

Osiris wrote: post #16

I have a side-project ( https://batterybarpro.com ) that's a native Windows application. It brings in $400-1000 a month.

happy customer here :)

Best part: it also shows battery health really well with discharge charts and can track multiple batteries (if you still have a laptop with which you can swap...).

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

#49

Post by QuiiBz »

jventura wrote: post #20
jarl-ragnar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uses a subscription pricing model though. I wonder why he choose that model. Personally I love the Sublime model, buy a license, use it anywhere.

I think it syncs the data between instances of the app (on the cloud - 10GB or something like that..).

By default, it's synced on Inkdrop's servers, but you can self-host your own DB if you want. It's well described in the docs: https://docs.inkdrop.app/manual/synchronizing-in-the-cloud

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

#50

Post by boppo1 »

mattl wrote: post #40
boppo1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how much longer this will last given stadia and xcloud. I've been playing on them and if they improve over 5 years' time, I could really see them becoming the standard.

Stadia won't be around in 5 years, it's a Google product.

I've read that they're white labeling the tech. So it won't be "Stadia" but it will probably still be around.
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