Hacker News Reader

Comment by burrish | Hacker News Reader

Why would I spend $30 (after the beta) for a software that already have a free and open source alternative ?

One reason would be support for far more file formats. Currently 2077 conversions are supported in How to Convert (many more to come), while 412 are supported in FileConverter. How to Convert also runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, while FileConverter is only on Windows.

It looks like a great project, but I can imagine it is hard for the maintainer to have time to add these features without any financial compensation. I'm not in a good financial place to make How to Convert open source yet, so am hoping users paying the current $7.5 will help support it's development.

It's a one time fee that gives you the project forever.

Sounds good, also I see that FileConverter needs "Microsoft Office installed and activated" and you seem to use LibreOffice, +1 really.

On another note it would be great if you could change how you display those 2077 conversions in your website, I find it really awkward to look at them by scrolling and if my mouse get out of the popup it disappear.

If you can do something "similar" to FileConverter where you can see all of them (at least a lot) on one screen, it helps with doing CTRL + F and searching your file format. :)

GL with the startup man

Thanks for the great and useful feedback. Yes, I love LibreOffice and agree that area is a little awkward so needs an update

Also I totally understand not making opensource but marketing your apps as privacy focused but it's closed source is hard to give you trust. I'm not an expert in analyzing apps, I guess people could use wireshark and see that nothing is coming out of your apps.

The privacy aspect of the app is there are no servers converting the file for you. Everything happens in the browser (in the demo) or using local tools. The demo in the browser's privacy can be confirmed with for example Chrome Developer Tools. For the app, people can confirm no sending of files with tools like wireshark or little snitch, and if people have ideas on how I can improve that transparency, then I'd invite it.

I'm just throwing ideas:

Wouldn't it be a good idea that you make a normal website to convert file format like any others, but the online service serve as an ad for your offline conversion app ?

I'm actually partially implementing that with the demo at the top being able to use WASM tech to run the conversion software in the browser. That way, you can still use a website and convert entirely on your own machine.

Working on improving it at the moment

Reply on news.ycombinator.com