[SML] RigCalc is back (slightly commercial post)

[Alex French]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Richard Niederberg
<ladesigners at gmail.com> wrote:
> Have you tested RigCalc on Windows 10, now that the same operating system
> can work on Desktop and Mobile devices? It would also make a nice addition
> for one of my Graphing Calculators!

I definitely don't have plans to introduce RigCalc as a Windows App.

On the technology side it doesn't ring any bells as a particularly
interesting project. On the "market" side (where I mean more "will
anyone use this?" than "will anyone pay for this?"), Windows mobile
devices have held steady at ~3% of the market for quite a while.  And
on the desktop... I'll digress for a moment...

I got involved with RigCalc when SML members were interested in a
stand alone, no-internet-needed version of RigCalc for Android (at
least at the time iOS had better "save this web page" functionality
that worked smoothly with Delbert's initial single web page version).
I got involved *because* writing a native Android app sounded
interesting.  I continued to write the iOS version for the same
reason- interest in learning about native iOS development.

If the goal was to pop out apps on several mobile platforms as quickly
as possible, it would make the most sense to use a toolchain/framework
like PhoneGap to write RigCalc that spits out compiled versions for
each mobile platform.  That has the added downside of getting more
toolchain/framework overhead to deal with, but the iOS and Android
versions are native apps just because that was what I was interested
in learning at the time.

Ironically... if I were going to do any significant RigCalc work at
this time, it would probably be to re-introduce a purely web-based
version... to get back to your Windows 10 question.

Knocking together a totally platform independent Javascript/HTML/CSS
version that matches the current feature set would be relatively quick
and easy, without the overhead and hurdles that come with any of the
native mobile platforms.  It even lines up better with my day-job tool
set.  Not as easy to monetize, but that was never my main focus.

So that's going right on the top of my list of side projects.  But
priority is evaluated sometimes bottom to top, sometimes left to
right, and sometimes alphabetically.

Alex French