Development speed

This is a place for users to discuss Altap Salamander. Please feel free to ask, answer questions, and express your opinion. Please do not post problems, bug reports or feature requests here.

Crowd funding

No, bad idea
2
15%
Yes, would offer up to EUR 10
7
54%
Sure, would offer up to EUR 50
3
23%
Super, would offer up to EUR 100
1
8%
Great, where I can send all my money?
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 13

Eric
Posts: 77
Joined: 28 Apr 2006, 22:52

Development speed

Post by Eric »

Hi Altap, Hi Jan,

You see that many people are disappointed; especially about the speed how fast the updates and changes are coming.
I don't know the reasons behind this, but I assume that AS is only a side project, not the main income for your business.

So allow me to make a proposition.

What about to set up a "crowd funding" project (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_funding) to speed up the development? I could offer up to EUR 200 when I get the certitude that the updates are coming sooner, like Unicode, UAC, X64.

Would this help you?

Thanks
Eric
Win2012, Win7, Win8 and Win8.1 x64 (german and english) | AS 3.0 beta 4 (x64)
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Ether
Posts: 1471
Joined: 10 May 2007, 16:08
Location: Czech Republic
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Re: Development speed

Post by Ether »

Some related threads: [...] where is your donate button?, [cs] Financial help for Unicode Viewer.

The developers said on multiple occasions that Salamander is their main business. Apparently, they spend a lot of time on tasks (some would say that unnecessarily big amount), but judging from the low amount of bugs found in Salamander compared to other products and its overall quality (no panel flickering, to give an example), it's not wasted time. I guess they could hire additional people to speed up development, but I very much understand the need to be sure that the code is in responsible hands and it doesn't seem exactly easy to find experienced and quality programmers.

My point is that yes, the development is slow, but speeding it up at this point would probably come at a price (in terms of the Salamander's quality) which some users are not willing to pay.

Disclaimer: This is not an official response and all of the presented thoughts are just my professional opinion and my observations.
Ελληνικά rulez.
Eric
Posts: 77
Joined: 28 Apr 2006, 22:52

Re: Development speed

Post by Eric »

Ether wrote:The developers said on multiple occasions that Salamander is their main business. Apparently, they spend a lot of time on tasks ...
Ether,

I'm not sure if it's only a question about quality. I agree, the quality of AS is great.
But I don't think AS is the main business. When it takes one to two years only to upgrade to a new compiler and adding some UAC functionality, they don't spend 40 hours with 2 or 3 person each week on AS.
And how they could survive only be selling licenses?
They needed to sell more than 300 licenses each month only to get some return.

So I assume that AS is the main business for ALTAP but the company isn't full time company.
Perhaps they have another job and ALTAP is her 'hobby'?

But anyway, my post got 115 views but only 4 votes.
There isn't a huge interest, so there's no way to change it how it's working now.


Eric
Win2012, Win7, Win8 and Win8.1 x64 (german and english) | AS 3.0 beta 4 (x64)
Jan Rysavy
ALTAP Staff
ALTAP Staff
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Joined: 08 Dec 2005, 06:34
Location: Novy Bor, Czech Republic
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Re: Development speed

Post by Jan Rysavy »

Eric, we are selling ~150 licenses per month and you are right that it is not enough for two people here in Czech Republic. This number contains several multi-licenses that are rather cheap, see the price list. 300 licenses per month would be so-so.

It is unfortunate but right now we need another income source. We hope AS 3.0 upgrade will help us with this problem and we will be able return to AS work with 100% of our time and solve the "Unicode" problem and other tasks. Salamander is definitely not a dead project, it has ~10K downloads & installations each month. Do not measure it by this forum, only very small fraction of AS users participate here.

Note: We are still working over 40 hour per person and week on AS. It is really huge project with with several time consuming dependencies (work on language translations, website, server management, bug reporting infrastructure, AS support, sales, our internal users database, accounting, etc.) We are migrating sales from our old e-commerce reseller SWREG to Paypal and rewriting sales database and website to support AS 3.0 upgrade.

Thank you for you support and ideas, we really appreciate it!
Eric
Posts: 77
Joined: 28 Apr 2006, 22:52

Re: Development speed

Post by Eric »

Jan, I appreciate your answer and your work efforts. AS and his ecosystem are great, great work of you and your team.

For sure I'm frustrated over the missing Unicode support, but I tried all the others file managers, always coming back to AS ;-) Still the best.

My first intention wasn't to upgrade to AS 3.0, because for me as user, I don't care which compiler you are using, only new features are counting. And there weren't many for me, besides the faster network copying.

But because the 'crowd funding' / donating seem not to work, you get my support by buying licenses.
Win2012, Win7, Win8 and Win8.1 x64 (german and english) | AS 3.0 beta 4 (x64)
rollhigh
Posts: 38
Joined: 19 Aug 2009, 22:26

Re: Development speed

Post by rollhigh »

I am a happy AS users and I have a 2.5 license but I cant wait for final release of 3! I will buy a new license happily :) I echo this thread, I wish developement was alot faster but understand that quality control is important. I tell all my clients about AS and they always come away impressed after I show it. I hope AS continues and gets even better, what can we in the community to do help?
net40
Posts: 1
Joined: 09 Mar 2013, 17:05

Re: Development speed

Post by net40 »

There are some free source codes that may already have Unicode support (not perfect?) implemented.
Like http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net/
Could they help a bit and speed things up?
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Ether
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Re: Development speed

Post by Ether »

net40 wrote:Could they help a bit and speed things up?
I guess it could help a bit, but a big part of implementing Unicode support in Salamander will be made of careful rewriting of existing code where external source code isn't of much help. (Disclaimer: This is in no way an official answer. My answer is based purely on my programming experience.)
Ελληνικά rulez.
Jan Rysavy
ALTAP Staff
ALTAP Staff
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Joined: 08 Dec 2005, 06:34
Location: Novy Bor, Czech Republic
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Re: Development speed

Post by Jan Rysavy »

Ether is right. Exactly.
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