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Why I'm Done Making Desktop Applications (2009)

Breaking up has always been difficult for me. I tend to fall in love with being in love, and continue a relationship well past the point of futility.

This generally leads to a severe reluctance to “phone home” from the application to the developer’s server — even reports on very innocuous data like “Did I steal this software or not?” is often tarred with the label spyware. For web apps, however, if you have a halfway decent A/B testing library (like, say, the free one I wrote for Rails developers), you can experiment with having multiple versions of the application available concurrently, and see which one performs best. By comparison, doing that on my desktop app would require 15 minutes of building, then waiting weeks while the new trials percolated from my website to the various download sites, and probably unforseen issues on Mac OS X 10.4 because apparently in a past life I must have stepped on Pharaoh Jobs’ cat.

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