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Original thread:
Post 4 made on Tuesday October 12, 2004 at 16:02
Don Stratton
Long Time Member
Joined:
Posts:
December 2002
190
On 10/12/04 03:48 ET, flipper2000 said...
Don,



WOW! Let me say it again... WOW! Thanks for all the feedback!

Clearly I don't know your application and it's
ability to interface with xml but thought I remember
you mentioning something about not currently supporting
palm os but planning on supporting it in future

The market for PDA-based remote control seems to be quite a bit smaller than we had thought when we began development over 2 years ago. We spoke to one individual about buying his PPC remote control app outright, so we could then incorporate our audio transmitter trick. That individual declined to sell, indicating he was adequately content with his weekly sales, a number he shared with us. After 2+ years Total Remote has never reached that mark, and based on conversations with other software vendors for Pocket PC I believe his numbers were likely inflated (quite a bit). One of the software guys I know told me his numbers on his top products, and these numbers seem to indicate to me I am reaching about as many users as I could hope to, at this time, under the circumstances. Our development costs and overhead on Total Remote are far higher than most PPC developers, many of which either work from home as a one-man-show or have a staff smaller than our marketing department.

Long story short: I just can't see competing in the Palm space right now. I am not satisfied with our efforts on the PPC yet, so I am hesitant to port Total Remote to any other platform. Some time after the release of v3.0/v3.1 I will take a very hard look at the market and decide what our Total Remote future might be. Of course, I may be overly critical of Total Remote; bear in mind I know EVERY SINGLE THING WRONG WITH IT, and you don't. It kind of colors my view and makes it hard for me to appreciate all the work we have done to date. ;)

I do remember someone showing a diagram of the
singals that are sent and thought that this could
probably be easily described in xml.

I'm pretty sure there is no way a text-based markup language could possibly handle the IR, but I have always wanted a GUI-less "engine" that could be called by other programs, and that would work extremely well with ANY programming language.

I would also like to mention that part
of the reason I even downloaded your application
to try out is due to your posts on this site.
You are clearly very user concious and available
to them in a way I haven't seen any other developer.

Tell it to my "superiors". "They" think I'm a time-wasting idiot for doing this. I come from a "information only helps" perspective, and some of "them" live by a policy of never telling the customer anything beyond what comes in the product manual. Classic case of engineers versus suit dweebs.

My suggestions are not
knocks on your application in any way. They are
just due to my mind racing with ideas about it.

I did not perceive any insult, and I am grateful that you are so interested that you would take the time to articulate your thoughts. The more vocal users like you make it better for the hundreds who read all this but don't take the time to post. It's like a letter to your Congressman; I consider one Total Remote user who posts comments likely represents 100 that didn't post any comments. Your words carry weigh with me!

I have no complaints and certainly understand
the priority of the money makers. I might be willing
to build such a thing (a sharing site) but not
willing to host it etc.

While I have yet to be notified officially, I have been advised that Griffin has no intention of creating our own, due to some ill-defined bugaboo the suit dweebs perceive. Hijacking the PDA forum here is about the best I could do. :/ It is just unfortunate that there does not seem to be a way for users to share skins and device files, since that had originally been a core part of our master plan.


--Don


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