As many of you know, I, in my spare time, develop applications for Mac under the banner of Blue Pyjama. I tend to have bursts of energy where I just feel like I need to write applications, followed by periods of several months where nothing new is made and things are just let to rot.
I’ve always wanted Blue Pyjama to one day become a money-making company, whether it be via the iTunes Store or through the sale of a desktop app. So far the day hasn’t come yet. This weekend was one of those super productive weekends. I wrote 2 applications that will be appearing on the Blue Pyjama website soon. One of them is a simple app for checking if your Internet is down, while the other is a web browser called Wildfire. Wildfire is actually reasonably OK. You wouldn’t want to use it as your main browser, but possible as a secondary one.
This got me thinking about sales. There are tons of apps that sell very cheaply ($10-$15) that are very simple and plain. How come browsers are free? With a web browser, you can do so much. Not that I want to pick on any apps in particular, but take Blitz for example; Blitz is a small utility that forces your computer to focus all of the CPU on one app. Blitz is $17.
How did this come to be? A web browser that gives you endless possibilities is free while a menubar app that makes other apps shut up costs $17! I’d have thought that the market should be the other way around, with a web browser selling for $17 and an application shutter-upper going for free. Once Wildfire is complete, I doubt that I’d be able to sell it – at most it would be donationware.
I guess that this shows how bizarre this world is. I’ll be interested to see what the comments are on this.
