CraigM wrote:So lets say Indigo updates yearly at ±$75 and iTouch updates yearly at ±$25. That's $100 a year, $8 a month, or $.30 a day.
Point of fact: we try to release a full paid upgrade about every 18 months or so - and we don't charge for Touch or remote access though that could change in the future.
CraigM wrote:I vote for charging whatever you feel your market will bear, BUT I would want more features and faster turnarounds.
And that, of course, is the rub. There are 2 of us in the company so more features faster isn't possible without adding more people. More people requires more overhead so adding 1 more person doesn't mean one more person working full time on features. And adding all of these features increases the support burden (which is happening now but at a slower rate - proportional to what the two of us release). So we'd have to increase the price proportionally to support another person and the additional overhead. We're not sure the market would bear that much of an increase - at least until we expand the market which was one of the biggest factors in our decision to add Z-Wave: it opens Europe, Australia, and New Zealand in ways that INSTEON and X10 couldn't/didn't.
CraigM wrote:My must have features ASAP:
- Control page editor redo [so hard to get professional GUI results from an editor that feels like 1980's]
- Pop-up editor [the ability to stay on the same iPad screen and get details via a pop-up instead of linking to a different screen, so an editor that allows you to create all facets of a custom pop-up GUI]
Indigo 6, as the current beta stands, is pretty much feature-complete. We won't be working any on the control page editor or adding features along those lines. Some work on the control page editor and control page functionality is pretty high on the list for the next major release (7 perhaps) but we'll have to see once we start planning that release. To be honest, how much time we spend on control pages/control page editor in the next release will depend on what we think the ROI will be for those features compared to other things.
We've had some discussions with some of the 3rd party remote control app vendors on iOS and we're hoping that they'll do more complete integrations with Indigo that would allow for more "professional GUI results". That's their core competency and their products are focused on creating great UIs. While it's important that we provide the ability to create custom UIs, it's unlikely we'll ever reach the level of polish/sophistication of those guys since that's not our sole (or even primary) focus. We hope to find some comparable Android product vendors and contact them as well at some point in the future.
CraigM wrote:More direct involvement from PA re: 3rd party plugins [Charging? Profit sharing? If developers stop updating their plugins that we count on, we are all in a world of hurt]
This is very high on our list of things to address after Indigo 6 is released. We realize that a thriving plugin community requires paid plugins that have continued support. Free plugins are great - but as you point out there is often little incentive to continue to develop and support a plugin without adding some kind of compensation.