[Ham-Mac] What I don't like?

[Chris Smolinski]

Mike Murphree wrote:

>>Another interesting thing that I've heard in this thread is that the
>>quantity sold would not justify the expense of writing the (ham)
>>software.  While this may be true,  most us realize by now that you're
>>not going to get rich selling ham equipment or software.  The question
>>that I would ask is would that developer have written the software for
>>himself anyway, after which other sales would just be icing on the
>>cake?

Quite true, I suspect that most Mac Ham software (or Ham software in 
general) was written by someone who had an initial interest and need 
for such software. That certainly was my case with MultiMode, which 
initially was written to just decode CW (and certainly wasn't called 
MultiMode at that time!). This was way back in the 68K days. I then 
added RTTY, ACARS and weather fax decoding, as these were of interest 
to me, and there were no Macintosh packages available. There was a 
weather fax program called "RadFax" at one time, but it was never 
actively developed.

It's the whole time/money trade-off issue. I could have developed 
MultiMode purely for fun, and purely for my own interests, and 
released it as such. It would indeed be free, but it would also do 
only what I want it to do. MultiMode does many things that while 
interesting and useful, are not entirely things that interest me. But 
they do interest others. Shareware/commercial software vs freeware is 
an interesting debate. Much like capitalism vs communism.

One reason for the huge amount of ham freeware for windows vs the Mac 
is the relative market size - depending on who you believe, the 
Windows market is 20 to 50 times larger than the Mac market. Let's 
pick a number, and say 35. That is a huge difference. Even if the 
percentage of Mac and Windows hams who program software is the same, 
you have 35 times as many programming for Windows. And each 
programmer is potentially reaching 35 times as many people. People 
who can give feedback. Don't underestimate the postive effect 
feedback can have on a programmer. Many days it was a polite email 
from a user (not necessarily someone who even paid for the program) 
that pushed me to work a little harder on that program. What's that 
old saying about flies, sugar and vinegar?

>>Also a number of the developers of PC software have supplemented their
>>incomes with sales to commercial customers in addition to individuals,
>>why does this not work for Mac developers as well?

One reason this doesn't work very well is that, as most folks on this 
list know, the commercial world (outside of a few niche markets) is 
dominated by Windows. I do know of one commercial use of MultiMode, 
to send ICAO SELCAL tone pairs for testing purposes, but that's it. I 
have received several inquiries from potential commercial users who 
wanted to run it on a Windows machine, but obviously had to turn them 
away.

I do want to thank all the list subscribers who have privately 
written me with their words of support, and yes, the next version of 
MultiMode is due out soon, I've managed to eliminate some unnecessary 
redrawing that should speed things up a little, especially on slower 
machines. I'm also working on a GMDSS decoder, for those who want to 
monitor these maritime transmissions, as well as some improved 
filtering in the FSK modes. Another series of baby steps along the 
path.

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Chris Smolinski
Black Cat Systems
http://www.blackcatsystems.com