Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcgrath_sh | Hacker News Reader

I think your business model is interesting. However, I'd be careful in letting users decide the direction of the project. It might be okay-ish now if the userbase is small, but when you hit a not unreasonably large number of people (500? 1k?), that can quickly deteriorate.

What if the most upvoted suggestion is something that you have no use for? Or if it is something that no future customer would want? Are you going to sink development hours into it due to the promises you made? What if the top features are continually fluctuating? I saw you are the only one who can add cards, and that is a deterrent for now.

This is a project I will be keeping my eye on, but I didn't buy a license today because "making paying users happy" gives me a bit of pause. Good luck going forward and I hope to want to buy this within the next year! The idea of a Sublime-like file manager is intriguing.

View on HN

That's an interesting point. I've had feature requests I don't agree with. The problem is that one feature may make one person happy, but (say) complicate the UI and thus make another person unhappy. It's a balance between my vision and what people want.

It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Btw why are the Linux and Mac versions both 21mb but the Windows version is only 1mb? Magic? I'm gonna assume magic.

Also: it doesn't seem to use Electron! Cool! But wait, it uses Python + Qt instead?

When there's doubt about feature requests, I side with conservative choices because I hate bloated software.

The Windows version is an online installer that always fetches the latest version from the update server. It's based on Google Omaha, the same technology that also Chrome uses for auto-updating. I wrote a blog post about this [1].

It uses PyQt instead of Electron. I was very tempted to use Electron, but its startup time is prohibitive. I wrote a blog post about this as well [2].

[1]: https://fman.io/blog/google-omaha-tutorial/

[2]: https://fman.io/blog/picking-technologies-for-a-desktop-app-...

Random question: why is the Windows distribution. 1MB and Lin/Mac 21MB?

The post you're responding to literally explain exactly that. The windows installer is a downloader, the others aren't.

It was late, but you are right :(

Exactly! Granted, this is a very early stage of development, so it may not be as big of a deal.

Another thing to keep in the back of your mind (if you don't mind more unsolicited advice) is that you are building something that is the base for plugins. For it to be as successful as Sublime is, the core has to be rock solid and be made up of core features only. Be careful with feature creep. And consider putting things that you may not feel are part of that core into plugins initially (think vintage in Sublime). If they are, then migrate them over.

(I promise, no more telling you how to oversee your project!)

Thank you for the advice :) Actually, all the basic functionality - copying/moving files, the Cmd/Ctrl+P "GoTo on Steroids" feature etc, are implemented in a plugin. I do this to make sure that fman's (Python) plugin API is powerful enough that plugin developers can do just as much as me.

Wow that's... actually a really good idea

Reply on news.ycombinator.com