41–50 of 77 posts
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iPhone app; for some reason I don't think the intersection between gun owners and iphone owners is big enough to justify the cost of development.
got any research to back that up?
But my idea of iphone owners is that they're "muggable", while gun owners are "unfuckwithable". See "ipod mugging" in google.
ipod(n): iphone without GSM chip.
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What about making it an iPhone/Android/similar application? I envision people using it not just when reloading, but at the range, when buying ammo at the store, etc. I may be completely off in my opinion, but it seems the kind of thing that aficionados would drop a few bucks on. Some for making actual decisions; others to use as an adjunct/reference in conversation. And those phones are becoming a vast marketplace. F…
iPhone app; for some reason I don't think the intersection between gun owners and iphone owners is big enough to justify the cost of development.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about making it an iPhone/Android/similar application? I envision people using it not just when reloading, but at the range, when buying ammo at the store, etc. I may be completely off in my opinion, but it seems the kind of thing that aficionados would drop a few bucks on. Some for making actual decisions; others to use as an adjunct/reference in conversation. And those phones are becoming a vast marketplace. F…
iPhone app; for some reason I don't think the intersection between gun owners and iphone owners is big enough to justify the cost of development.
I think that someone who is ready to drop significant change (money) on on guns and other shooting accessories (which aren't cheap), particularly as a shooting hobby, would be plenty willing and able to spend a bit extra for a smartphone. The phones have so many other uses; I imagine they, or rather their format and capabilities, are going to become standard fare within a couple of years (with the current economic "repression" being perhaps the biggest unknown factor in this evolution).
Also, many shooters are technologists, if of a different flavor. A lot of time and attention paid to materials, workmanship, and performance. The leap to an iPhone or similar may be less of a gap in terms of mindset than might be imagined. If it's a good and useful tool, they will appreciate it.
In short, many shooters may have the phones already, before too long. A few might be nudged into the addition expense by the availability and utility of applications such as this -- though I wouldn't count on such conversions of themselves for generating a significant market for the application.
I don't know whether it makes sense for the original poster to go this route. It obviously would involve significant additional time and effort towards learning the environment and porting the application. Also some significant expense for the development environment. On the other hand, I -- again, just off the top of my head, or perhaps out of my other end ;-) -- imagine real potential in the resulting marketplace to which the application would have exposure.
I could be quite wrong, but I'm throwing the idea out there for consideration/conversation.
This is a great indication of the potential of a desktop "appstore". If it works for the iPhone, why not desktop?
I'd also suggest setting up a free web version but under a completely different name and domain. Slap on some relevant ads (Adsense, ebay, etc).
You're note going to destroy your market either way. You're not making anything right now, so experiment!
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iPhone app; for some reason I don't think the intersection between gun owners and iphone owners is big enough to justify the cost of development.
I'd like to hear more on this cost of development. The biggest cost would be buying the developers license. His algorithms are already written, so it's just porting them to Objective C and slapping a Cocoa Touch interface to it (which shouldn't take more than a day, soup to nuts with no Cocoa experience). Plus you get the added benefit learning a useful SDK.
The cost of picking up a new platform to learn. The cost of hours spent kluding an iphone development environment on whatever his current desktop is. The cost of writing said app. The cost of submitting it to Apple and waiting for how ever long it takes for approval. The cost of time spent polishing the site so it fits with the glossy, round-cornered aesthetic of the iPhone (possibly learning a graphics package or hiring a designer.) The cost of waiting for the pennies to trickle in from the huge user base of gun-owning, bullet property measuring, badass iphone users who don't know of crackz sites.
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As a general rule, I don't pay for command line utilities. Put a shiny GUI on it and I'd probably reconsider. Plus command line applications are not user friendly (especially Windows based ones) and take more effort to run than a nice clickable icon and GUI. My suggestion, either give it away for free or develop it to a point where you can add a GUI to it (shouldn't be hard with a couple hours of C#) and then charge…
As a general rule, I don't pay for command line utilities. Thank goodness it's only you. I made a decent living writing database archiving tools as CLI utilities because the vendor supplied GUIs weren't scriptable.
Most likely the potential customers buying the app he built are people who don't know what a command line is.
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As a general rule, I don't pay for command line utilities. Put a shiny GUI on it and I'd probably reconsider. Plus command line applications are not user friendly (especially Windows based ones) and take more effort to run than a nice clickable icon and GUI. My suggestion, either give it away for free or develop it to a point where you can add a GUI to it (shouldn't be hard with a couple hours of C#) and then charge…
As a general rule, I don't pay for command line utilities. Thank goodness it's only you. I made a decent living writing database archiving tools as CLI utilities because the vendor supplied GUIs weren't scriptable.
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iPhone app; for some reason I don't think the intersection between gun owners and iphone owners is big enough to justify the cost of development.
I am seeing iPhones all over the place, here in the Chicagoland area. And I'm seeing a lot of them in the hands of people I would hardly call technologists. I think that someone who is ready to drop significant change (money) on on guns and other shooting accessories (which aren't cheap), particularly as a shooting hobby, would be plenty willing and able to spend a bit extra for a smartphone. The phones have so many…
This isn't all in place, yet, in a convenient fashion. But I can imagine it falling into place.
You need your phone with you, anyway, if nothing else then for use in case of accident, injury, getting lost, vehicle failure, etc. If it can do all these other things for you, well, that's the cat's meow.
If my imagination bears any resemblance to what evolves, it would seem to me to be a pretty decent market to sell into.
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As a general rule, I don't pay for command line utilities. Thank goodness it's only you. I made a decent living writing database archiving tools as CLI utilities because the vendor supplied GUIs weren't scriptable.
That's the sort of stuff technical folks want to be able to use (and script) from the command line. This guy has written an app for people who are into guns .
How many gun owners do you know? I know a bunch. They're an odd group, insomuch as they are not as simple to peg as some might think.
Sure, some are Dukes of Hazzard beer swilln' hicks, but others are top-grade software developers, teachers, and engineers.
I'm skeptical about selling CLI apps in general, but I don't think it's made any better or worse when targeting gun owners.
(To the original poster: go grab JRuby and Monkeybars and bang out a cross-platform GUI version!)