"Thirsting" for RevMobile but...

[gyroscope]

Hi all. Long time no hear, hope all's well with everyone!

I, like a lot of people I'm sure, have "iPad lust". And reading about RevMobile, am developing RevMobile lust! To be able to write and design progs for the iPad in particular (on the Mac platform, in my case) would be terrific.

What will stop me in my tracks from buying RevMobile though, when the Mac version is ready, is the price. No way could I justify £1000 for a piece of software; apart from not being able to afford that sort of money, it would be crazy to spend that, being only a hobbyist programmer. Then there's the "redundancy factor": I personally wouldn't be interested in any other platforms other than the iPad (and possibly the iPhone at a later date).

My suggestion is to sell each part of RevMobile as separate units, single-platform use, i.e one unit for the iPad, another for the iPhone, yet another for Windows Mobile, etc. perhaps each unit costing £150 to £200. This way, people could buy for just a specific platform they want to write progs for; the affordability would certainly ensure many more sales (taking into account hobbyist programmers; maybe more than 5 times as many, making Rev more money anyhow); there wouldn't be any "redundancy" there; and at any time, another platform "module" could be bought (and afforded) by many more people.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, thank you.

[BvG]

I am too a hobbyist. Strangely, runrev is my hobby, and not programming. So I'm going to the conference and thus have the phone stuff already.
To develop for iPhone or iPad is (at least in the mid-term) not going to be a cheap hobby. To do that you need the developer subscription from apple, i remember it at 50 bucks per month. In addition, looking at what runrev is planning, I'd say you'd be quicker to get to the iPad, if you'd be developing stuff using Obj-C.

Said that, I'm all for lower prices. But obviously runrev thinks that only the hard core business rev users will use the phone stuff.

Edit: forgot your proposal. If runrev splits the price and the product into three, wouldn't they get two third less money from those that'd pay any price for just one of the phone platforms? So I'd say they would lose money by splitting it up.

[malte]

To get on the app store (if they let you) will cost 99$ a year if I recall correctly. The greatest problem will be to pass the app stores guardians though. No guaratee you can get your app (no matter what it was written in) there.

Regarding the price for revMobile: I think it is very reasonable. I still can recall, when this was the price for rev Enterprise (boy am I old). Jokes aside: what the RR team needs to do there is to fund producing 3 completely new engines. One for iPhone/iPad, winMobile and one for maemo. That takes a lot of dev time (and for that matter money)
Sure this will be hard to cough up, if programming does not pay your bills. For people like me though, being able to get on that platforms will justify the price with the first paid gig we get to produce anything for that devices. Not needing to jump through the Obj-C hoops (and visual studio for that matter) and being able to use the existing code base is well worth every penny we will spend for it. (And all I can say is, that I do not want to live in Obj-C land, neither do my co-workers)

From a business perspective splitting up revMobile and thus being able to order the different platforms seperately, would unlikely fund the other engines I guess. I for one want all of them. True, I make a living out of the code my company writes, but if I think of all the time that will be saved not needing to learn all that low level languages, I will be more than happy to give RR what they ask for it.

Just my 2 cents,

Malte

[paul_gr]

I upgraded to Enterprise last year, assuming it would follow the previous path of covering all platforms. Yeah I know, I shouldn't assume anything.
I'd be happy to pay for revMobile, if I didn't find Rev sometimes has a mind of it's own when I want to build something reasonably complex.
I've been using Rev for 4 years; I like the concept but find it sometimes unpredictable.
I'd like to see the existing product range made more stable before I spend more money on yet another version.

my 2c

Paul

[paul_gr]

It will be interesting to see how revMobile compares against the competition, especially at the price...
The most likely competitor to revMobile is likely to be Flash CS5, which will include a Packager for the iPhone...

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flas ... phone/#faq

Competition is a wonderful thing...

cheers
Paul

[malte]

Yes. Competition is indeed always good. Flash currently retails at 699 USD. Though it might be possible to go for an upgrade by grabbing a used version on ebay first. Well. Still would not buy me my existing codebase. And still would mean (one of) my coworkers would need to learn actionscript. Might be worth it, most likely in a situation like my companies, not. Interesting times.

Cheers,

Malte

[FourthWorld]

And then there's NimbleKit - $99, lets you use JavaScript in xCode to build iPhone apps:
http://www.nimblekit.com/

[gyroscope]

Thanks guys for the informative replies. These other cheaper alternatives that you mentioned I'll look into, although it might mean learning a different coding language which my l'il brain might not be up to (!) as well as not being Rev script based, where I feel relatively comfortable.

Ah well, perhaps I'll take the plunge with RevMobile in a couple of years time...