Spending $50 saves me a lot of time and frustration. Also, it is much cheaper than writing the software myself (which I was seriously considering). I'm more than happy to pay that.
I also hope that because the software is well priced, the company won't feel a need to diverge into multiple half-baked products. I've seen that happen to Ironic Software (Yep, and afterwards Leap, Deep, Fresh), I'm seeing it happen to IcyBlaze (iDocument, and then Sparkbox). I'd much rather see a company develop ONE well-supported and polished app than diverge into multiple bug-ridden ones.
> I also hope that [..] the company won't feel a need to diverge into multiple half-baked products.
You bet. Since 1998, we have a small set of well-maintained software products. ShareMouse is not a quick shot. We are here for the long run.
Why?
ssh othermachine 'pbpaste' | pbcopy
Why not just have a proper shared clipboard plus keyboard/mouse sharing in a multi-computer, multi-monitor setup?
Because if you don't need keyboard/mouse sharing that's just bloat running on your machine, because you become dependent on yet another utility that may be discontinued or receive a crappy update at any time, because it's less flexible (can I share only on demand?), less portable and it costs $50 that would be better spent on blackjack and hookers (or whatever you do for relaxing).
Yes, you can.
> less portable
There is a portable option
> and it costs $50 that would be better spent on blackjack
Oh, we should always listen to such kind of advisers.
I mean OS portable. I use Windows and Linux, you don't support that.
Oh, we should always listen to such kind of advisers.
I don't mean as an investment, I mean as entertainment. The "blackjack and hookers" is a reference to Futurama: http://youtu.be/z5tZMDBXTRQ
By the way, I'm not saying my solution is better than your application as a whole, far from it. I'm talking about the case where you only need clipboard sharing, which I know is only one of the features of your application.
ssh othermachine x2x -to :0 -eastI'm convinced this is a significant insight. Most consumers are trained to assume that they're always buying from Megacorp and that cheating and complaining is perfectly valid behavior.
Back when I was landlording, I had a HUD tenant who was a total pain - until she found out that her rent minus my mortgage was about twenty bucks a month. She had just assumed that as a property owner, I was rolling in cash. After that, she was pretty nice.
There is apparent oversupply of app developers who seem to think they will make money but the evidence is very few will build sustainable businesses while the rest just help Apple out by adding diversity.
I've had apps in the iPad "what's hot" music app list many times but they're still only bringing chicken scratch compared to what I could have made consulting instead. The handful of home runs you hear about obscure the fact that for 99% of us the best way to make money in the app store is to charge by the hour for writing them for someone else.
The response from the vendor (about it being hard to make money to pay his developers when selling a fairly niche tool) resonates with me, though. I built a fairly specific-use tool on the side last year and started selling it on the Mac App Store. I found that prices weren't very elastic, and I had to drop the price down to $2 to sell very many copies.
Even then, people think I'm some big company selling this software, when the revenue I generate from it isn't nearly enough to pay my bills, much less hire others to work on it. Even last year when I spent a while in the top 5 in dev tools, I wasn't netting more than $25 per day.
Ultimately, I think the app store concept is really cool and will be a net positive in the long run, but I wonder how many useful tools will fall through the cracks because buyers have been conditioned to think that a $5 app is "expensive", even though it isn't nearly enough to support some tools.