5 ms·

Makes me nostalgic of desktop software. I hate that everything today is a website and requires a ridiculously fast internet connection. And what seems to be in

• deterministic 2y ago
  I work for a company that mostly sells complex desktop software (with complex backends) using a subscription model.
• hermitcrab 2y ago
  You buy a perpetual licence for version N. You can then optionally upgrade to version N+1 later at a 60% discount.
  • lotsoweiners 2y ago
    The best business model.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • beached_whale 2y ago
      I am also ok with one like Jetbrains where you subscribe and after a year you can keep the last version you paid for. They do a lot of updates, so the money is going into the product but one isn't forced to stay in order to use it.
      • DrBenCarson 2y ago
        Confusing IMO because they use years as the major version. If I subscribe May 24 - May 25 and they don’t release 2025.1 until just after my sub ends…which version do I get? That said I’m a jetbrains fan and like their recent move to include all features in community editions (need licensing for commercial use obviously)
        • beached_whale 2y ago
          I didn't exactly know, but found https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-a-perpetual-fallback-license https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
          • DrBenCarson 2y ago
            Sounds like the fallback license is for the version available on the date the 12 mo subscription started
    • dehrmann 2y ago
      It's not actually that different from the subscription model; the interval is just longer. At some point, you'll upgrade your computer and find the old version of the app no longer works, and you'll be forced to upgrade. Depending on how quickly the app evolves, you might prefer the subscription model so you can follow new how-tos, and it can be more reliable since developers are only supporting a few versions out in the wild. I'm not saying you need to be on the bleeding edge, but if any part of your personal tech stack is older than ~4 years, it'll start to have problems, and you're going to be left behind.
      • sour-taste 2y ago
        Really? I'm still using sublime 2 from 10 years ago and it still works great across Mac and windows.
      • antaviana 2y ago
        I believe it is in this interview from 1996 where I saw Bill Gates saying the same thing about Microsoft products, he saw them as subscriptions. It’s a long but interesting interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFFlO7yBIBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFFlO7yBIBM
      • hermitcrab 2y ago
        Microsoft is very good at backward compatibility. So 10+ year old versions of PerfectTablePlan probably work on Windows 11. Apple is much less good at backward compatibility. It is a bit of a two edged sword. Customers have to upgrade, you also have to keep updating libraries and releasing new versions to keep up.
      • _kush 2y ago
        >At some point, you'll upgrade your computer and find the old version of the app no longer works, and you'll be forced to upgrade. It comes down to the developers to make sure the older versions are regularly updated and make sure they run on newer operating systems and architectures.
        • dehrmann 2y ago
  • hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
    I especially like this if the 60% multiplier becomes 60%² at N+2, 60%³ at N+3, and so on. Feels like you're getting rewarded for hopping on early.
    • hermitcrab 2y ago
      Too complicated. I charge the same for v5 -> v7 and v6 -> v7.
      • hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
        Well, I like it anyway.
      • anthropodie 2y ago
        You mentioned you have been developing Indie products since 2005 in your about section. Can I read about this somewhere?
        • hermitcrab 2y ago
          Pretty much the entire https://www.successfulsoftware.net https://www.successfulsoftware.net blog is about that. Maybe start with: https://successfulsoftware.net/starting-a-microisv/ https://successfulsoftware.net/starting-a-microisv/
          • anthropodie 2y ago
            Didn't realise you were OP!
  • palata 2y ago
    Do you have a lot of people buying upgrades? Still wondering if this market is not full of people who buy it one time for their wedding :-).
    • thinkcontext 2y ago
      Probably wedding planners are the biggest customers.
      • palata 2y ago
        I don't know: * I have been to quite a few weddings. I have never been to a wedding organised by wedding planners. * The author wrote the first version for themselves and weren't wedding planners.
• rvz 2y ago
  > Makes me nostalgic of desktop software. I hate that everything today is a website and requires a ridiculously fast internet connection. And what seems to be in fashion for "desktop software" today is to ship a website together with a whole browser and pretend it's not a website. Funny isn't it? These days developers experienced with building typical desktop software are being asked Leetcode hard puzzles to find the most optimal solution on the first attempt. Yet when they are hired most of them choose what I see as the most inefficient (in both memory, disk space and runtime), suboptimal and very low quality software as the "solution". When I mean "the most" it really is the worst solution possible, which is all these Electron based "desktop apps" which is an entire browser rebranded as a "desktop app". It is even laughable that those who believe using a faster language when using Electron would make it more performant. This has never been more further from the truth as the worst-case performance still applies as long as you are using Electron. SWEs not being able to build (native) desktop apps or apps that don't use a browser is a skill issue.
  • nobankai 2y ago
    > SWEs not being able to build (native) desktop apps or apps that don't use a browser is a skill issue. It's a runtime issue. If developing a native app requires an expensive SDK, complex distribution agreement or multiplatform codebase, any rational software engineer will choose to ship once and run anywhere. Anything else is a waste of time and money unless management dictates otherwise. Electron will be king until shipping native interfaces is as equally accessible as web development.
    • zoom6628 2y ago
      This. And I live in hope that WASM runtimes can address some or all of this one day.
      • xp84 2y ago
        So then we can ship a binary on top of JavaScript in a browser engine on top of the native platform! ;)
• fuzztester 2y ago
  >And what seems to be in fashion for "desktop software" today is to ship a website together with a whole browser and pretend it's not a website. yeah! shipsters /s ugh
• skinner927 2y ago
  I am fully aware how much more performant native desktop applications can be compared to the “let’s ship a browser” popular alternative. That said, do you, or anyone else who often makes this (fair) complaint, have any experience writing native desktop applications? Have you ever tried to implement drag and drop, animations (like accordions), modals, gradients, and custom elements? Not to mention, GPU acceleration. I can only speak for Windows and Linux, but the native APIs are atrocious. The frameworks for these native APIs are cumbersome and inflexible. Styling is, without a doubt, the most complex part. It’s all so complex that shipping a browser + an api to talk to the host is easier.
  • jeremyjh 2y ago
    If you use Qt, like in TFA, then you don't have those issues. You use a markup language for layout if you want, javascript if you want, C++ if you want.
  • nikau 2y ago
    Call me a boomer, but I preferred old apps that had a consistent interface instead of all the random wheel inventing.
    • riffraff 2y ago
      I don't recall a single time I thought "gosh, I wish this app used an accordion". But custom controls, e.g. the table-and-chair view in TFA seems a sensible thing to have in specific apps.
  • andrekandre 2y ago
    > Have you ever tried to implement drag and drop, animations (like accordions), modals, gradients, and custom elements? not to sound like a salesperson but its not too hard in (apple) appkit [1] using cocoa and core animation [2] (and all of this is even easier in swiftui especially animation and styling [3]) [1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppKit/drag-and-drop https://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppKit/drag-and-dr... [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CoreAnimation_guide/CreatingBasicAnimations/CreatingBasicAnimations.html https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co... [3] https://swiftui-lab.com/custom-styling/ https://swiftui-lab.com/custom-styling/
• codelion 2y ago
  That's a really good point about the complexity of native desktop development. I've definitely felt that pain trying to wrangle native APIs for even simple UI elements. It took me a while to figure out how to get smooth animations working in one project. On the other hand, shipping a whole browser feels so wasteful, especially for smaller apps. I've been experimenting with Tauri recently, which uses the system's webview. It's a nice middle ground, and the performance is noticeably better than Electron from what I've seen.
• hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  >I hate that everything today is a website and requires a ridiculously fast internet connection. And what seems to be in fashion for "desktop software" today is to ship a website together with a whole browser and pretend it's not a website. Earlier this week I cobbled together a tiny, totally self-contained pocket dictionary between Finnish and English [1]. It's a TUI, but I tested it on Mac and Windows and the program works perfectly fine there -- double clicking on it just pops open a little terminal for tsk to do its thing in. The first bit of advice I got when posting it online to my usual places was "Why not make it a normal GUI program, or better yet, use React?" While I did briefly consider it, it really seemed like overkill for the very simple problem I was trying to solve here, and it might balloon the ~30 MB exe to >100. To be fair, I have negative interest in monetizing this kind of thing. [1]: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/tsk https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/tsk
  • palata 2y ago
    > it really seemed like overkill for the very simple problem I was trying to solve here Usually people throw heavy frameworks at simple problems just because it's easier, not because it's needed. I like a lightweight TUI a lot better than a huge ElectronJS app.
    • DrBenCarson 2y ago
      Yes and most engineers building GUIs professionally use those frameworks day in and day out so they’re just very comfortable with using them Independent of the implementation, people build GUIs to make the functionality accessible to a LOT more users
      • hulitu 2y ago
        > Independent of the implementation, people build GUIs to make the functionality accessible to a LOT more users Microsoft and Google would like a word with you. /s (Transient windows you cannot close, no scrollbars, no window borders, no clear delimitation of GUI elements, etc)
• _kush 2y ago
  The most common model I see these days is a lifetime license and one/two year of free updates with it. Once your free updates are over, you can keep using the last covered version forever, or purchase another year of updates for a discount (20% to 40% off of the original license price). This has 2 advantages: - You can buy the additional updates whenever you want in the future so it's leaner than a subscription. - It also makes sure you get at least 1 year of updates, as opposed to unknown time period of updates when the licenses are tied to a major version.