91–100 of 107 posts
Great topic! Short answer: 'No' The idea of software development for the desktop is one of the reasons why I got into learning to code in the first place. FWIW I think a developer should look outside the tech community (and I define tech loosely to include artists,illustrators and such.) There are, as has been pointed out, many industries that are neglected,pharma,finance(!),education,religion,home-users. In addition…
Great topic! Short answer: 'No' The idea of software development for the desktop is one of the reasons why I got into learning to code in the first place. FWIW I think a developer should look outside the tech community (and I define tech loosely to include artists,illustrators and such.) There are, as has been pointed out, many industries that are neglected,pharma,finance(!),education,religion,home-users. In addition…
I like how you considered religion an industry.
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> Money? That's harder, unfortunately. It's hard to innovate when people want to cling on to what they already know. This is a core element of my questions that other answers are unfortunately not addressing. Even if you make software that's less clunky than legacy-grade Adobe Kamatsu-tractor like offerings, how do you make make switching lucrative to the point of achieving self-sustainability?
I definitely agree that people are slow to switch from what they know, but I don't think it is impossible to build software that will make people jump ship on the old stuff. Take Sketch for example ( http://www.sketchapp.com ). Everyone on our team used to use Adobe Illustrator, and now everyone uses Sketch instead, because for what we do, it is simpler and better.
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"Money? That's harder, unfortunately. It's hard to innovate when people want to cling on to what they already know." It's also hard to make money when there's so much free software available, some of which is quite good. For example, it would take a huge amount of effort to improve on the functionality of Libre Office, Paint.net, Audacity, Wireshark, etc. (just to name a few of the free programs I use) but since peop…
All of those have piles of competition that make a bunch of money, except maybe Wireshark. In fact, I'm a paid user of the alternatives (MS Office, Photoshop, Reaper). I have used the free alternatives that you've mentioned, but relative to the commercial offerings, they are functional but clunky. I think there's still piles of room for innovation on the desktop, both for open source and commercial software. We've re…
At the mortgage company I worked at after college, the entire company was using "command line style" "ms-dos" looking software that ran the entire company. This software completely dominates the entire mortgage market! Makes some boring ass mortgage software with a GUI and some bug fixes and you might make yourself a millionaire. And the software was not "rock solid". It had all kinds of bugs that screwed up customer…
what software would that be :) :)
"Can you think of any worthwhile/interesting software that is desktop-specific (Windows/Linux/Mac) and that does not already have in-production offerings by at least two competing teams?" I would say Microsoft Visio on Windows, and Omnigraffle on Mac OS X would be good examples. Both software packages that command a premium price, have virtually no competition on their respective platforms and are very specific to th…
I think this is a reflection of the fact that the web is actually a pretty good platform for developers.
Desktop is for sure at the end of the hype cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle but that does not mean that you cannot make money or not be successful when you write a very good software or you hit a particular niche. And I would not fear Google or Apple, I cannot remember when Google did the last time a rich and good desktop app for end consumers (was it Picasa, the last one?) and the only big professional…
Funnily, Google [itself] has discountinued its "desktop search engine", which is a great pity, as there have been no decent alternatives and then, what do you do when you need to search, say, a document database, consisting of some .xlsx and .docx files (which are essentially compressed XML files, as I get it)?
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Funnily, Google [itself] has discountinued its "desktop search engine", which is a great pity, as there have been no decent alternatives and then, what do you do when you need to search, say, a document database, consisting of some .xlsx and .docx files (which are essentially compressed XML files, as I get it)?
For finding files within Windows, there's Everything[0], which is pretty fast and small (just one .EXE file). [0]: http://voidtools.com/
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Hahahaha yeah. I've tried a lot of different systems and tools and combinations, but I've never even gone near iTunes. I'm not sure why, I think I just have a subconscious intuition that it would be terrible. Goodreads is surprisingly frustrating to use, I wonder why nobody's made a better version yet.
All of the book sites seem to have really bad notifications that an author you like has released a new book. They heavily spam you with 'recommendations' to read books that you explicitly dont want to read, but never even a peep about authors you told them you like.
ps: authors -- get a goddamn email list. You can write short fiction set in the same universe as your longer works and I'll buy it for $3 for 30 pages. Way more profitable than a whole book. Have a gap between releases? Spend 2 weeks and earn $10k or more. It's nearly free goddamn money. See, eg, Mira Grant.
"Can you think of any worthwhile/interesting software that is desktop-specific (Windows/Linux/Mac) and that does not already have in-production offerings by at least two competing teams?" I would say Microsoft Visio on Windows, and Omnigraffle on Mac OS X would be good examples. Both software packages that command a premium price, have virtually no competition on their respective platforms and are very specific to th…
Visio has plenty of web-based competitors. I think this is a reflection of the fact that the web is actually a pretty good platform for developers.
If there's a market for desktop users that would buy that over a subscription to a web-based system, then it could still be a valid space to try to develop in.