Hacker News Reader

Comment by kaitnieks | Hacker News Reader

We are (at http://www.blumentals.net). Windows apps, in fact, and not for big companies but regular people. I don't know what to tell you, the market is far from dead, maybe it will be dead someday, but right now things are fine. The hardest thing about making mass-distributed Windows apps is getting your good app to the customer through a pile of crappy ones.

View on HN

What do you develop Windows app with? I've been toying with making a Windows version of web only app I am working on, but so far the only option seems to be using C# with .NET. Are there any other options out there? (Not that I have an issue with C#)

I'm not the OP but there are a bunch of options:

- C++ (with all of the variety of GUI frameworks) - Delphi - Java - D (again with GUI frameworks) - Python

We are using Delphi. C# is a great language and .NET is fine if you're designing for a specific customer but it's (in our opinion) not a viable option for shareware apps, as it generates decompilable executables that require a large framework to run. Most people have .NET runtime framework installed, others have no problem downloading it but it is still a problem for a percentage of the users.

I don't want to offend you or anything, but maybe a redesign of your site would give you some extra boost!

It looks fine to me.

In fact I've become a little suspicious of sites that are highly polished but seem to have little history.

I don't want to offend too, but it really does look more like a pirated software site, that.

It's in progress. The new version is at http://blumentals.biz and we're switching product by product.

I'm curious if there's a reason why all of the products on the website are version "2011" instead of "2012"? They seem to be up-to-date, and could have been spun up...

I've heard once before that in some circumstances people are more comfortable buying last year's version numbered products than this year's version numbered products.

I'm just wondering if that's the case (a), or if it's just that no new major changes have taken place (b).

It does seem like there's no single distribution channel that a Windows app developer can reach out?

Windows 8 aims to fix that with a built-in app store, it's a bit simplistic so far but works.

Apps can either be hosted on the Windows app store, or it can be hosted by the developer with just a link from the app store to a download page.

It's important to note that "Desktop Apps" in the windows 8 world are only going to be links from the app store. The developer / company will need to provide their own billing, hosting, deploying, updates, etc. Also, only companies will be able to get desktop apps listed in the app store.

For "metro style apps" i.e. apps that are full screen and run on the Metro version of the .NET framework, those get the full app store experience, and will be able to be submitted by individual developers (i.e. not full companies)

More information here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/06/08/list...

Also, it's important to note that for "metro style apps" you existing libraries will likely have to be rewritten. If you've architected your application well, and only need to change the UI of your app for a different platform, this isn't possible with Metro-style, as far as I can tell. Your libraries have to be of a special type - a "metro class library" - in order for them to be referenced by your metro-style app. So far, I've been very frustrated by this experience and may just bite the bullet and go with the other hosting option.

Hi ! this is what i meant in my question . small apps that folks that ready to pay for , to get things done !

kaitnieks : can you tell about difficulties ? what software you are using ? and how do you handle pirates?

We're using Delphi with various component packs. It would be very expensive to buy all the components at once but we bought all the tools necessary during the previous years one by one. If you want to make Windows apps and you can ignore developer community's hostility against Pascal, then I would recommend Delphi, but if you plan on making cross-platform solutions then take a look at Qt.

Pirating will happen, that's inevitable. The main thing here is not to make your paying customers victims in the fight against pirates and not to worry too much about your software in torrents. Make sure your keys can't be easily generated; people tend to avoid using modified executables for reasonable fear of viruses but have no problems using pirated keys.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com