Summerfest 2023 is on. Loads of quality software for Mac and Windows from independent vendors, at a discount. This includes my own Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan, which are on sale with a 25% discount.
Find out more at artisanalsoftwarefestival.com .
This is a guest post from fellow software developer, Simon Kravis.
It’s sometimes said that software development is only 10% of what’s required to earn money from software and I can attest to that. Since 2018 I have been developing photo captioning and related software, more as a retirement diversion than a serious source of income (after a career mostly involved in writing scientific and engineering analysis software), in the hope that sales income would at least cover running costs. My best marketing tool has been writing reviews of the class of software that I produce, and the hosting site (Hub Pages) provides some useful analytics on how often these are accessed and for how long. Below is the graph for an article on tagging.
The decline since early 2022 is hard to explain – the article is periodically updated so the steady decline is not due to diminishing ‘freshness’ – which for Google is probably a file Modified date.
Here is another review article profile (Scanning Multiple Photos) showing a similar decline:
But another (Best Photo Captioning Software) has held up, though at a low level.
I offer digital photo captioning software (Caption Pro) on Windows and Mac platforms, and an iPhone captioning app (CaptionEdit), with the Windows version dating back to 2017. I also offer part of the functionality of Caption Pro on Windows for auto-cropping scans of multiple paper photos (ImageSplit). On Windows neither Caption Pro software downloads or sales seem to correlate with review accesses, despite about 1/3 of web site accesses coming from the review. However, downloads do show some correlation with Caption Pro web site sessions, as shown in the graph below.
Sales do not correlate with downloads, which perhaps explains why most advertising for niche products is not successful – it may increase downloads but this does not appear to increase sales. The observed proportion of downloads resulting in sales for ImageSplit and Caption Pro are 6% and 9% respectively. The lack of correlation between sales and downloads may be due to the small number of sales per month, which results in random fluctuation dominating the results.
The decision to enter the Apple “Walled Garden” of software was partly at the prompting of friends rather than a commercial evaluation. Apple Developer membership (costing ~US$100 per year) is required to prevent software being blocked from installation through being from an unknown publisher. Further costs were purchasing a fairly modern Mac on which to perform development, as the App Store will only accept software developed using recent versions of the Xcode development environment, which will only run on fairly recent hardware. The App Store takes a commission of 15% on sales, which is quite reasonable when compared to the difficulty of implementing e-commerce on Windows, where a PayPal account eases the problem of low-value foreign-currency transactions, but e-commerce plug-ins may stop working after years for no discernible reason. The review process for software acceptance into the App Store is generally fast, but seemly trivial issues can require resubmission. Features which have passed one review may be rejected in a later one. The review process is generally fast, but on one occasion took 4 weeks.
Caption Pro for Mac has been available (via the App Store) only since Sep 2021.It appears within the top 6 results for a search using “Caption Photos”, which is the source for most downloads. About 3.5% of downloads result in sales. This figure is much less than the Windows version of the same app, despite Mac users’ reputation for being more willing to pay for software. The iPhone app did not appear at all initially when searching for “Caption Photos” in the App Store. After 6 months it began appearing as result number 140, after it had 360 downloads. This poor ranking performance is probably because “Caption Photos” is a very popular keyword used by many apps, including those that only caption videos. It has had very few downloads and sales, despite Apple Search Ads and Apptimizer campaigns. The number of downloads increased dramatically during the Apptimizer campaign between Jan 24 and Feb 2 (as they were purchased) but the change in ranking from these downloads did not result in any sales, perhaps because no installs were purchased. The Apple search ads campaign (which resulted in the app being shown as an ad 1 in 50 times when the search phrase “Caption Photos” was used) did not greatly affect downloads or sales. A Facebook ad campaign to show a link to the app whenever “Genealogy” or “Genealogy Software” was searched for was also unsuccessful, and very expensive, as Facebook charges by impressions rather than clicks. Additional backlinks to the web site were purchased in September 2022 from Links Management in an attempt to improve the web site Google ranking, but this did not appear to have any effect on web traffic.
Mac and Windows users contacting me with problems have had a wide range of experience level – from completely naïve to former programmers. Most have been from the US, which reflects the geographic distribution of sales. There have many downloads to non-English speaking countries but very few sales.
Some results from the Mac and iPhone Apps are shown below:
On balance, developing for Apple platforms was not a good commercial decision, as the advantages of a mostly captive audience (completely captive in the case of the iPhone) do not seem to result in higher rates of downloads or sales. Competition for iPhone apps is so intense that niche products without massive advertising budgets are unlikely to succeed. The same is likely to apply to Android phone apps, which anecdotally have a less rigorous review process. My experience is that advertising and backlink purchase for any platform are not effective in increasing sales for niche software.
Simon Kravis runs Aleka Consulting, a small software and consultancy company in Canberra, Australia specializing in information management and offering a number of software products. He has mainly developed scientific and engineering programs, starting in the era of paper tape.
The authenticode digital certificate I bought back in 2019 expired recently, so I had to get a new certificate (you can’t renew a certificate, as such, you just need to buy a new one). A few months before the expiry I emailed KSoftware.net, who I had bought previous digital certificates from and with whom I had always had a good experience in the past. No reply. I tried a couple more times, including the personal email of Mitchell, the founder. Nothing. Someone else told me they had had similar experiences. Their recent trustpilot ratings are a horror show. And the copyright date on their website is ‘2003 – 2021’. But they were still advertising on Google Adwords. I have no idea what is happening here. If you are reading this Mitchell, I hope you are ok.
With KSoftware out of the picture I looked elsewhere. Eventually I ended up buying a new Sectigo certificate from signmycode.com. I partly chose them because they offered a 5 year certficate and the less often I have to go through the ball ache of a getting a new certificate, the better. The experience was decidely mixed.
The good:
The mediocre:
The bad:
This is what you see when you click on ‘Buy now’:
When you see this, wouldn’t you expect to get a single 5 year certificate? If there was anything explaining that this was 2 separate certificates, I didn’t notice it. It certainly didn’t mention it on their home page. This feels deceptive to me.
Who knows if this company will still be there in 3 years time? I emailed them and told them I wanted to keep the new 3 year certificate and for them to refund the 2 year certificate. They said they would only refund the entire order and then I would have to start the whole process all over again. They also claimed:
“renewal validation is much more easy then buying a new certificate as most of the validation part is getting carry forward.”
We’ll see. Buyer beware.
See also: The great digital certificate ripoff?
** Update 08-Mar-2023 **
Michell of KSoftware has contact me to say that he is alive and kicking. Read the comments below for more details.
Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan Professional edition are both on sale for 25% off at Winterfest 2022. So now might be a good time to give them a try (both have free trials). There is also some other great products from other small vendors on sale, including Tinderbox, Scrivener and Devonthink. Some of the software is Mac only, but Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan are available for both Mac and Windows (one license covers both OSs).
Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan Professional edition are both on sale for 25% off at Summerfest 2022. So now might be a good time to give them a try (both have free trials). There is also some other great products from other small vendors on sale, including Tinderbox, Scrivener and Devonthink. Some of the software is Mac only, but Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan are available for both Mac and Windows (one license covers both). Sale ends 12th July.
Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan Professional edition are both on sale for 25% off at Winterfest 2021. There is also some other great products from other small vendors on sale, including Tinderbox, Scrivener and Devonthink. Some of the software is Mac only, but Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan are available for both Mac and Windows (one license covers both). Sale ends 11th January.
This is a guest post from fellow software developer, Simon Kravis.
Few developers would choose their development platform on the merits of their respective Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) but it happens that applications developed in Windows need to be made available on the Mac platform.
There are many environments offering cross-platform (Mac, Windows and sometimes Android) functionality, but close inspection shows that they all have limitations. Visual Studio (the native Windows IDE) can produce apps which will run on a Mac using .Net Core – but only if they are command line apps on Windows. Other environments (like Xamarin) do support interfaces, but only involving simple controls like text boxes or drop-downs. There are other cross-platform IDEs (such as Qt) which offer better graphics support, but they are not cheap and the extent of their support is not evident. If you need functionality such as computer vision, there seems to be no alternative to creating a separate code base for the Mac. Once you start on this path it becomes obvious that Macs handle graphics (and interfaces) very differently from Windows.
Macs have evolved rather more than PCs over the decades: they abandoned their proprietary Mac operating system in favour of UNIX in 1999, adopting the NeXTSTEP platform created by NeXT. Apple originally used PowerPC chips, replacing them with Intel Core processors in 2006, and they are currently transitioning to RISC chips. The Mac NeXTSTEP programming language was Objective C, developed in the 1980s and this is still supported, although the modern Swift language was introduced in 2014, and the Xcode IDE appeared in 2003. Xcode is free, even for teams. It uses the Cocoa API, which is accessible from other environments. The current release (MacOS 13.0) supports both Objective-C and Swift and is also used for developing iPhone and iPad apps. Mac operating systems since Catalina (released in 2019) are 64-bit only. Xcode can only develop apps for Apple operating systems, notably iOS, which powers the iPhone. Most of the web questions and examples relate to iOS rather than MacOS. MacOS uses different frameworks from iOS, so some functions used in iOS are not available in MacOS, or have different parameters.
The Windows IDE (Visual Studio) dates from 1997, when it bundled together Visual Basic, Visual Fox Pro and Visual Source Safe and Visual C++. It has an open architecture based on plug-ins and supports 36 different programming languages, but the major ones are C#, VB.Net and C++. Visual Studio can develop apps for any platform via the .NetCore framework, but capability for non-Windows platforms is limited. The Community edition is free, and has almost all the functionality of paid versions.
Both Visual Studio and Xcode are highly complex applications. They both have graphical interface builders where controls are dragged from a library onto a form. Each application has a vocal supporters and detractors. My experience comes from about 5 years with Visual Studio developing C# applications. Before this I worked with Visual Basic for Applications in Microsoft Access, so I am well-versed in the Microsoft way of doing things.
Like most complex applications, Visual Studio and Xcode each have plenty of bugs, often producing completely unhelpful error messages. Reporting an Xcode bug through standard channels resulted in … nothing. Not even an automated message saying “Thank you for feedback. It will be used to improve future versions”. I haven’t even tried to report a Visual Studio bug, but I suspect that the much larger user base for Visual Studio will mean that workarounds are more readily available, even if the giant ship of Microsoft takes years to respond.
Moving to the Mac and Xcode for development was a shock as I found I didn’t know how to do the most basic things. String manipulation (used in most applications) in Objective C is highly verbose compared to C#. Google was invaluable for finding answers – mostly they were from Stack Overflow, but often from 10 or more years ago, sometimes from Apple Developer Forums. As Xcode has changed considerably since then, answers often had to be adjusted before they could be used. Another problem is that functionality once provided externally has since been incorporated into Cocoa, so attempts to find a current version of a component (or framework as they called in Cocoa) are often unsuccessful.
MacOS provides more native functionality than Windows. Features such as computer vision and PDF generation are included in MacOS, rather than requiring the use of 3rd party components, which may not as robust as desired, and may require a license for commercial use. However, documentation of MacOS functionality, if present at all, was rarely useful. A few times I asked questions on Stack Overflow which attracted the ire of the Mac gurus for either through having obvious (to them) answers or through not conforming to the forum guidelines (in their opinion). However, the integration of NuGet with Visual Studio provides easy access to the massive number of 3rd party libraries available for .Net on Windows.
The model-view-controller paradigm used on the Mac took some getting used to, as did the design of the main Xcode screen. Sometimes a useful display would disappear and I had difficulty in finding it how to bring it back. I often had to resort to retrieving earlier versions from the excellent Time Machine backup. Form design is similar on both platforms – dragging and dropping components from a library. Both Xcode and Visual Studio have bugs, as would be expected for such complex apps. Events from components are generated automatically in Windows, but have to be defined on the Mac (as Actions). References to the component you’ve added also need to be defined on the Mac (as Outlets) and are not a property of the component, whereas on Windows they are.
The Xcode environment provides only basic facilities from scratch: if you need to do something more sophisticated you’ll have to Google around to find out how. Once you know – it’s easy, but the learning curve for Xcode is much higher than for Visual Studio.
Rather than starting from scratch with the Mac version of my Caption Pro app, which uses local computer vision functionality to detect multiple photos, changes image dimensions and adds text to images, I found an existing open-source project on GitHub with similar basic functionality. This dated from 7 years ago and used Objective-C, so that was the language I opted for. An immediate handicap was that many of the answers I found to my questions used Swift in their example code, which is not interconvertible with Objective-C in the way that C# and VB.Net are. iOS applications for the iPhone (which are most common) use different frameworks from Mac apps, and routines in them sometimes have completely different syntax.
The user interfaces for the Mac and Windows versions look quite different, as shown below. There are some basic differences – menus appear separately to the application window on the Mac and are locked to the top of the screen, whereas Windows menus are part of the application screen. Toolbars offer access to common functionality on the Mac. Differences also arise from the fact the Mac application was adapted from existing code rather than created from scratch.
Open-source examples (often from GitHub) are useful, but rarely work out-of-the- box. Sometimes the modifications need are minor – like defining the development team- but sometimes it’s not possible to get them to build in a current version of Xcode.
Debugging on Xcode is frustrating – the call stack frequently contains assembler (which is perhaps why app performance tends to be better on Macs), and the debug variables window does not list all relevant variable values. Variable types may not be correct – Boolean values may appear as dates, and sometimes variables cannot even be evaluated by po (print out) statements. Printing out structure variables may show nothing. Despite the generally superior performance of Mac apps, building apps in Xcode appears to be much slower than in Visual Studio on similar vintage machines, and after code stops at a breakpoint, it may take a long time before the variables window is filled. Deployment of Mac apps can still be done on an ad-hoc basis, but you have to register as an Apple Developer to avoid blockages in installation arising from being an ‘untrusted source’. Bypassing these blockages is more than a matter of clicking “Install anyway” so it’s hard to avoid forking out US$100 per year for registration. Windows has similar blockages, which can be bypassed with a code-signing certificate. These certificates are available from many vendors, and are slightly cheaper than Apple developer registration, but the process of obtaining one may be very involved.
Ad-hoc deployment is somewhat easier on the Mac than on Windows, but the method of doing it via Archive generation is anything but obvious. Mac applications are actually disk images and applications keep all of relevant files in a folder. This makes uninstallation a matter of dragging the application icon into the recycle bin, a far simpler process than on Windows. dmg files are not recognized by IIS web servers (and may not be by Apache either), so unless the file type is registered, download from a web site will not be possible.
Apple pioneered the App Store for iPhones (it is the only way in which iPhone apps can be installed) and Mac apps can also be put there. Apple takes a commission of 30% (or 15% if you are a small company) and they review all apps before adding them. Passing the review process may be a lngthy process, as not all problems are detected in a review cycle. Fixing these issues and resubmitting may result in further problems coming to light. The review process may also be somewhat arbitrary. One App Store app presented an interface in German by default. English was available as Preferences option, but only after guessing where the Preferences option was located. App Store apps operate within a sandbox, which places restrictions on filesystem operations. Whether App Store deployment makes economic sense depends on the nature of the app, its market and price structure. Its advantages are that it targets the 16% of desktop users who use Macs, and streamlines installation (and payment, if applicable). The App Store supports ‘freemium’ pricing, where additional features are made available to paying users, but apps with free trial periods are shown as being free but with ‘in-app purchases’, which annoys some users.
Windows deployment can use .msi files, which have been around for decades, but are not easily installed by non-admin users. Self-extracting executables are more tractable, but 3rd party tools have to be used to create them. Windows 10 introduced Universal Windows Programs, which are easier to install and can be placed in the Microsoft Store, which operates in a similar way to the Apple App store, but for Windows desktops and tablets.
A key question which is very difficult to answer is “How long will it take me to convert my Windows app to run on a Mac?” Factors affecting this are app complexity, functionality and programmer skill. The time between starting work on the Mac app and first deploying it on the company web site was about 3 months, but the amount of time spent on the project each day varied between zero and 3 or 4 hours. If you are a paid resource, then the cost of a cross-platform IDE may be justified, but the requirement for local computer vision functionality added a great deal of complexity to my requirements, which is one reason why I opted for a separate code base. Substantial evaluation would be required before deciding if a cross-platform environment could support any required functionality.
Simon Kravis runs Aleka Consulting, a small software and consultancy company in Canberra, Australia specializing in information management and offering a number of software products. He has mainly developed scientific and engineering programs, starting in the era of paper tape.
Dark themes are now available for Windows 10 and Mac and it is increasingly expected that desktop applications will offer a dark theme. Previously Qt support for dark themes was patchy. But I am happy to say that it now seems to work fine with Qt 5.12.2, and I have added dark themes to both Windows and Mac versions of my Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan applications.
Easy Data Transform for Mac with a dark theme:
Easy Data Transform for Windows with a dark theme:
Hyper Plan for Mac with a dark theme:
Hyper Plan for Windows with a dark theme:
I haven’t decided yet whether to add a dark theme to PerfectTablePlan.
Adding dark themes was a fair amount of work. But a lot of that was scouring forums to work out how to integrate with macOS and Windows. Hopefully this article will mean you don’t have to duplicate that work.
Dark themes work a bit differently on Windows and Mac. On Windows changing the UI theme to dark won’t directly affect your Qt application. But you can use an application stylesheet to set the appearance. On Mac changing the UI theme to dark will automatically change your application palette, unless you explicitly block this in your Info.plist file (see below). On both platforms you will need to change any icons you have set to the appropriate light/dark version when the theme changes. Some of this may change in future as dark themes are more closely integrated into Qt on Windows and Mac.
You can add the following helper functions to a .mm (Objective-C) file:
#include "Mac.h"
#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
bool macDarkThemeAvailable()
{
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
bool macIsInDarkTheme()
{
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
auto appearance = [NSApp.effectiveAppearance bestMatchFromAppearancesWithNames:
@[ NSAppearanceNameAqua, NSAppearanceNameDarkAqua ]];
return [appearance isEqualToString:NSAppearanceNameDarkAqua];
}
return false;
}
void macSetToDarkTheme()
{
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55925862/how-can-i-set-my-os-x-application-theme-in-code
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
[NSApp setAppearance:[NSAppearance appearanceNamed:NSAppearanceNameDarkAqua]];
}
}
void macSetToLightTheme()
{
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55925862/how-can-i-set-my-os-x-application-theme-in-code
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
[NSApp setAppearance:[NSAppearance appearanceNamed:NSAppearanceNameAqua]];
}
}
void macSetToAutoTheme()
{
if (__builtin_available(macOS 10.14, *))
{
[NSApp setAppearance:nil];
}
}The macSetToLightTheme() and macSetToDarkTheme() are useful if you want to give the user the option to ignore the OS theme. Call macSetToAutoTheme() to set it back to the default.
Corresponding header file:
#ifndef MAC_H
#define MAC_H
bool macDarkThemeAvailable();
bool macIsInDarkTheme();
void macSetToDarkTheme();
void macSetToLightTheme();
void macSetToAutoTheme();
#endif // MAC_HYou then need to add these files into your .pro file:
macx {
...
HEADERS += Mac.h
OBJECTIVE_SOURCES += Mac.mm
}You can detect a change of theme by overriding changeEvent():
void MainWindow::changeEvent( QEvent* e )
{
#ifdef Q_OS_MACX
if ( e->type() == QEvent::PaletteChange )
{
// update icons to appropriate theme
...
}
#endif
QMainWindow::changeEvent( e );
}If you decide you *don’t* want to add a dark theme to your Mac app, the you should add the bold entry below to your Info.plist file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
...
<key>NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>This will then force it to be shown in a light theme, regardless of the theme the operating system is in.
To set a dark theme palette you can use a stylesheet:
QFile f( ":qdarkstyle/style.qss" );
if ( !f.exists() )
{
qWarning() << "Unable to set dark stylesheet, file not found";
}
else
{
f.open( QFile::ReadOnly | QFile::Text );
QTextStream ts( &f );
getApp()->setStyleSheet( ts.readAll() );
}The stylesheet I used was a modified version of qdarkstyle from a few years ago.
To unset the stylesheet and return to a light theme just call:
getApp()->setStyleSheet( "" );Alternatively you can do it by changing the application palette.
Windows helper functions:
bool windowsDarkThemeAvailable()
{
// dark mode supported Windows 10 1809 10.0.17763 onward
// https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53501268/win10-dark-theme-how-to-use-in-winapi
if ( QOperatingSystemVersion::current().majorVersion() == 10 )
{
return QOperatingSystemVersion::current().microVersion() >= 17763;
}
else if ( QOperatingSystemVersion::current().majorVersion() > 10 )
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
bool windowsIsInDarkTheme()
{
QSettings settings( "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Themes\\Personalize", QSettings::NativeFormat );
return settings.value( "AppsUseLightTheme", 1 ).toInt() == 0;
}Currently there seems to be no way to conect to a signal or event that shows the theme has changed in Windows. So I connected to a signal from a QTimer that fires every 5 seconds to check windowsIsInDarkTheme().
When the theme changes you potentially need to update any icons you have set, e.g. for the toolbar.
In a light theme you can usually set the active icons and let Qt calculate the corresponding disabled icons. This doesn’t work for a dark theme as you want the disabled icons to be darker than the enabled icons, rather than lighter. So you can either calculate the disabled icons programmatically or you can provide a set of disabled icons as well. I opted for the former.
Assuming your icons are set up as resources under :/icons/dark and :/icons/light you can do something like this:
QString getResourceName( const QString& iconName, bool dark )
{
return QString( ":/icons/%1/%2" ).arg( dark ? "dark" : "light" ).arg( iconName );
}
QPixmap getPixmapResource( const QString& iconName, bool dark )
{
QString resourceName = getResourceName( iconName, dark );
QPixmap pixmap = QPixmap( resourceName );
Q_ASSERT( !pixmap.isNull() );
return pixmap;
}
QIcon getIconResource( const QString& iconName, bool dark )
{
QIcon icon;
QPixmap pixmap = getPixmapResource( iconName, dark );
icon.addPixmap( pixmap );
if ( dark )
{
// automatic disabled icon is no good for dark
// paint transparent black to get disabled look
QPainter p( &pixmap );
p.fillRect( pixmap.rect(), QColor( 48, 47, 47, 128 ) );
icon.addPixmap( pixmap, QIcon::Disabled );
}
return icon;
}Then you can reset the icon for the appropriate theme with:
bool isDark()
{
#ifdef Q_OS_MACX
return macIsInDarkTheme();
#else
return windowsIsInDarkTheme();
#endif
}
...
myButton->setIcon( getIconResource( "my_icon.png", isDark() ) );
...You may also be able to update icons through QIcon::setThemeName(). But I didn’t explore this in any detail.
Note that you probably don’t want the enabled icons to be pure white, as it is a bit too visually jarring against a dark theme.
I have been working hard on Easy Data Transform. The last few releases have included:
Plus lots of other improvements.
The installer now includes 32 and 64 bit version of Easy Data Transform for Windows and installs the one appropriate to your operating sytem. This is pretty easy to with the Inno Setup installer. You just need to use Check: Is64BitInstallMode, for example:
[Files]
Source: "..\binaries\windows\program\{#MyAppExeName}"; DestDir: "{app}"; Flags: ignoreversion; Check: not Is64BitInstallMode
Source: "..\binaries\windows\program64\{#MyAppExeName}"; DestDir: "{app}"; Flags: ignoreversion; Check: Is64BitInstallMode
But it does pretty much double the size of the installer (from 25MB to 47MB in my case).
The 32 bit version is restricted to addressing 4GB of memory. In practise, this means you may run out of memory if you get much above a million data values. The 64 bit version is able to address as much memory as your system can provide. So datasets with tens or hundreds of millions of values are now within reach.
I have kept the 32 bit version for compatibility reasons. But data on the percentage of customers still using 32 bit Windows is surprisingly hard to come by. Some figures I have seen suggest <5%. So I will probably drop 32 bit Windows support at some point. Apple, being Apple, made the transition to a 64 bit OS much more aggressively and so the Mac version of Easy Data Transform has always been 64 bit only.
I have also been doing some benchmarking and Easy Data Transform is fast. On my development PC it can perform an inner join of 2 datasets of 900 thousand rows x 14 columns in 5 seconds. The same operation on the same machine in Excel Power Query took 4 minutes 20 seconds. So Easy Data Transform is some 52 times faster than Excel Power Query. Easy Data Transform is written in C++ with reference counting and hashing for performance, but I am surprised by just how much faster it is.
The Excel Power Query user interface also seems very clunky by comparison. The process to join two CSV files is:
Whereas in Easy Data Transform you just:
If you have some data to transform, clean or analyze please give Easy Data Transform a try. There is a fully functional free trial. Email me if you have any questions.
I finally released a paid version of Easy Data Transform today, for both Windows and Mac. I am very pleased with how it has turned out. Obviously it is only v1.0.0, so there is plenty of additional features I could add, including:
But I need to listen carefully to prospective customers to decide which additional features to prioritize in future releases. It might be something I haven’t even thought of.
But v1.0.0 already has a really useful core of features. And, if you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0, you didn’t release it early enough. That said, I haven’t cut corners on quality. It has proper documentation and has been through extended beta testing, dogfooding and several rounds of usability and third party testing.
The product has a fully-functional 7 (non-consecutive) day free trial. I think that is enough for prospective customers to decide if it does what they need. I also have a 60 day money-back guarantee.
I have decided to go with a subscription model: $99 / €90 / £75 + tax per person per year. Which covers up to 3 computers. At this price point I can afford some paid promotion and to provide a decent level of support. I am not offering a monthly subscription, as I don’t really want people who are going to pay for 1 month (to do their annual TPS reports) and then cancel.
Have you got some data you need to merge, clean, reformat or de-dupe? Give it a try. You can get a 25% discount if you buy a subscription by the 27th December 2019 using this link.
Successful Software 