It’s only a matter of time before this particular guy is ready for primetime… And by primetime I mean the market that happens to be 33 times larger than the one that I’m serving currently.
It almost boggles the mind in a way: 33 times more people use Windows than the Mac, and I’ll have a chance to target a sizable chunk of them. Wow.
Anyway, it will be a while before iRooster is available for Windows, but it’s definitely coming along. I have to say, the speed of developing in Visual Studio (2003, not Whidbey. Whidbey’s actually much faster) is truly impressive. I’m able to work far more effectively in Everett than I can in XCode. This is primarily due to the tight and super-effective integration of the Forms Designer with the backend code, and the ease of working with managed code (in such a beautiful language too!)
It will be several months before iRooster for Windows is available (which will probably start off at v2.5, but we’ll see). You know the 90-90 rule, the first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time. The second 90% takes the other 90% of the time. If you go waaaay back to August 2003 you’ll see where I was griping about how much work it takes to really polish an application for commercial release. iR for Windows will be no different.
Also, a few notes about system requirements:
I expect to require at least Windows 2000, just because I don’t expect my target market to still be running Windows 98 (or ME for that matter). Basically, if you haven’t upgraded your OS in the past 7 years, chances are you’re not big on buying shareware. Please correct me if I’m wrong on this. I’d love to be challenged on this.
I will require v1.1 of the .Net Framework to be installed. I’d love to use VS 2005 for this project, but I don’t want to tie myself to a currently unreleased version of the Framework (as beautiful and wonderful as I think it is). Ostensibly, one or two revisions after the initial release will require 2.0. 2.0+VS 2005 makes a number of things that I’d like to support incredibly easy (like using the system’s Icon Title Font, UI layout with Snaplines, possibly ClickOnce, etc.)
Possibly Related Posts:
- More on iRooster 3.0
- Alarm Clocks
- Producing Software, the Easy Way
- Chimp Tunes working better again
- Tiger
One Comment
Careful about over-high windows market expectations. A huge chunk of those users are business installs, where there might not be as much call for an alarm clock app. Plus there are probably about 33 times as many other alarm clock apps for windows. I don’t want to discourage you, just noting some facts. Lux sales are about 50/50 mac/windows. Although the windows side seems to be pulling ahead recently.
FYI, My breakdown of windows traffic is that Windows 98 accounts for 4.2%, windows ME for 2.8%, Windows 200 is 9% and the vast bulk of windows traffic is from XP.