Dear HN,<p>I decided to extract a part of functionality from one of my iPhone Apps and make it into a library and sell it a secondary product. Now, as factoring it out into a general use library is not really trivial, I thought I'd ask for some advice before proceeding.<p>I've put a small mockup page here: http://getsuperpin.com/<p>Do you think this could be a viable business? Would you buy such component if it saved your time? How much do you think I should charge for it?<p>Thanks!
I've just talked to esad (he's sitting right next to me at the local cocoaheads meetup), what the component does is use a separate R-Tree like data structure to keep track of MapView annotations and perform clustering/display and it seems to deal fine with ~50k annotations on an iPhone 3G. Esad's using this in his local search app <a href="http://www.oeffnungszeitenapp.at/" rel="nofollow">http://www.oeffnungszeitenapp.at/</a>
One of my/our side projects is actually basically the same concept (different components), with a similar backstory (except they grew out of contract work - and yeah, I retained copyright), but a little further along. You can actually already trial and buy our components at <a href="http://appuicomponents.com/" rel="nofollow">http://appuicomponents.com/</a><p>We've been too busy to actually promote it since launching, but also not really sure how best to go about it. We get a bit of organic search traffic, but it's not enough to make the effort worth it so far.<p>I actually searched for components like ours before embarking on the projects that needed them, and would have happily paid for them, assuming source code was provided. The iOS platform isn't <i>that</i> stable and I'd be very worried about relying on the developer to update the component(s) fast enough in case of breaking changes. I don't know whether that means there's a sustainable market out there, but I do know some people do make a decent amount of cash with it.<p>One thing I haven't seen elsewhere are trial versions. We provide an x86-only binary + headers for free, which means it only runs in the Simulator.
Would it be open-source? With an open development process? I could see paying for a library, but I can't see building on top of something maintained by a single developer that I can't fix myself.
PlausibleLabs.com, run by Landon Fuller (noted Mac & BSD dev) & others, do it.<p>Clickable: <a href="http://www.plausiblelabs.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.plausiblelabs.com</a>