6 months ago, I started to distribute the first public version of OSTC Planner.
Origins
I had the application around for nearly one year, it was my test-bed to propose, develop and test new features for the OSTC dive computer. As such, graphs and runtimes started to appear on the HW forum in various discussions. And soon enough, interest raised, and I was asked to distribute it. Christian and Matthias were kind enough to license me part of the code I participated in, to make a commercial application, providing it was distributed for a cheap price. So I did it.
I soon received many enthusiastic feedbacks, suggestions or support from the tech diving community. Thank you !
Quick Figures
I found the experience interesting. So I wanted to share it, too. In 6 months, there have been 23 versions distributed (plus more betas) totalling 3000 downloads (not counting robots and various internal usages). This was a surprise. And an appealing one. Better: roughly 900 users do upgrade the software on a regular basis. Most probably thanks to the automatic check and update feature (sadly available only on the PC version yet).
it was surprisingly easy to make the software multi-lingual, thanks to the support of a few willing beta testers and contributors. Even if it is a small burden to keep all translations in sync with the many new features and interfaces.
Mac OS X platform took only a few weeks to add. Mostly thanks to the Qt multi-platform interface library. But I had recently to drop support of 10.5 systems and the old PowerPC processors, if I wanted to keep pace with the latest systems (10.7 Lion). In the near future, I am looking at evaluating an iOS port…
No Futures ?
OSTC Planner, the dark side : only 100 users bothered to register yet !
I had to buy a few mandatory softwares / hardwares / subscriptions to ensure its development, so the financial aspect of this enterprise isn’t quite in the black yet. Considering that I stopped counting the many hours, weekends and sleepless nights I gave over my free time, the result barely seems positive.
So please register ! It’s quite cheap, really …