OSTC Planner -- 6 months already...

[JeanDo]

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 in this 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 …

OSTC

OSTC is the Open Source Dive Computer, developed by HeinrichsWeikampf in Germany.
It received a great reception from the Tech divers around the world, and quickly became one of the reference machine for tough conditions (extreme and sporting dives, caves, etc.). A dynamic ecosystem is developing around the dive computer, see links here.


[img]http://ostc-planner.net/wp/wp-content/u ... lanner.png[/img]

[Sipadiver]

well i bought it, it's a nice piece of software.
a request is being able to plan repetitive dives and of course an iOS version

[Jean-François]

My buddy and I bought it too. We just love it and only use the OSTC planner as our planning tool

[Questioner]

If finally an IOS version is released, would it be free for registered users?

That would be a nice push for users to register, and is kinda foolish to buy twice for the same software...

[cparsons]

I bought it and wished I hadn't...keyed to one PC only, installed it on the office PC before I discovered this

[scubatinoo]

Questioner Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If finally an IOS version is released, would it be
> free for registered users?

I guess this is not possible do to apples app policy: either you pay for the app or it's free. so i recommend:

Pay for the App (iOS, Android,...) EUR 19.99, but App will run on all iDevices

Pay for the Software EUR 19.99, but software comes with 4 serialnumbers for 1x Office-PC, 1x Home-PC, 1x Mobile-PC and 1x Spare (PC = Win/Mac)

So JeanDo gets EUR 40.- and we can use the OSTC-Planner on almost every device we have. Some kind of a win-win situation

[scubatinoo]

Hi JeanDo

JeanDo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> 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 ?

Did you ever think about porting your App to HTML5? Just red yesterday about the new Firefox-OS, which is completely written in HTML5, including all Apps... So HTML5 might be a way for a new multiplatform solution... I don't know anything about HTML5, so i'm just wondering if this might be the future?