I've heard a few times that creating a decent desktop program with a GUI takes far more skill and experience. I can see why that is, since a fully fletched desktop program can be orders of magnitude more complex than most of the mobile and web apps.<p>I'd love to see more of the bleeding edge desktop software like the Adobe stuff, Blender, all the DAWs for Audio, etc. But it feels to me that not very many programmers have the skill to pull something like that off. Also, there doesn't seem to be much of an incentive left to invest into such things.<p>I would very much want that the mind set changes a little bit. Great desktop software makes a profit from selling to customers who value quality and awesome features. I wonder why that is not enough incentive for ambitious programmers. I only ever hear about developers for mobile and web apps getting a lot of money for things I seriously don't care about.<p>I have the feeling that we use desktop computers for the same things we used them ten years ago. I can't even remember when I had the last "I need that!"-moment for desktop software. So why can't we reinvent the desktop with software, like many try to reinvent what phones and web apps can be used for?<p>It's like the desktop computer in this day and age is slowly reduced to a platform (OS) for a platform (browser) for web apps. That's probably why many can get by with a tiny laptop or even a chromebook, which is probably the culmination of that thought.<p>However, I've not lost all hope. My bet is on virtual reality. If someone can build a really awesome VR application where everybody's like "I need that!!!", I can see how the desktop could return to its former glory, considering that a decent VR needs a ton of compute. But there's still the problem that VR is hard, GPU programming is hard, 3D is hard, parallelization is hard and optimizing is hard.<p>So are there any pioneers left with an enormous amount of skill and time who would risk to start such a glorious and uncertain journey without some VC guy dropping a few million dollars on the table? Or are we all going to end up as web developers because that's where the capital seems to be?
I have seen some but they are not in the B2C space. Usually in specialty B2B space.<p>A lot of medical applications (signal processing, visualization, robot control) tend to be traditional desktop applications.<p>Also military applications for analysis, and planning are often desktop based because they can not use consumer mobile devices nor can they rely on the "cloud".
Neonto:<p><a href="http://neonto.com" rel="nofollow">http://neonto.com</a><p>Mac desktop app (native Cocoa + OpenGL, no web views).<p>Desktop is pretty much necessary for this tool because it needs to integrate with Xcode and Android Studio.
Feem - LAN chat/file transfer utility. cross platform (Linux/Mac OSX/Windows Desktop/"Modern" Windows/Windows Phone/iOS/Android/).
Trivia 1: We are based in Cameroon/Africa.
Trivia 2: I'm the sole developer.
<a href="http://www.jamkazam.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.jamkazam.com</a> - we are not yet VC-backed, but I hope so soon.<p>Because latency is an absolute premium for playing music in real-time across the internet, we've focused first on the desktop, where we have the most control ... but still find a ton of challenges.<p>If you saw this recent article about Android and audio latency, you can see why there are challenges in the mobile space: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9386994" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9386994</a><p>If you were to try and build a web-only version of JamKazam, WebRTC is your best bet but it does not have low enough latency, either.
I'm trying to figure out how he made the small grey lines under the subtitles like "Coding Skills" and "Design Skills"....can't figure out what's creating it. Anyone?
Interesting topic.<p><a href="http://microisv.com/" rel="nofollow">http://microisv.com/</a> has some info.<p>Andy Brice's blog, Successful Software, sometimes has articles about other mISVs than himself. He has a product, Perfect Table Plan, that has done quite well. And he recently created another product that has also started doing well.<p><a href="http://successfulsoftware.net/" rel="nofollow">http://successfulsoftware.net/</a>
In the traditional, server-independent, sense? Hard to serve advertisements that way.<p>There's always a lot of new game studios, but I don't think they count. There's no end-game in games development, no lock-in, no network-effects, no industry-standard-status. A single bad game can ruin the studio.
<a href="http://www.boxifier.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.boxifier.com</a> - Sync and backup any folder to Dropbox. 100% desktop app.<p>We are bootstrapped. An app like ours probably wouldn't make sense for a VC to back but it feels really great knowing that people from all over the world use it to backup their external drives to Dropbox or collaborate on the files on their NAS using Dropbox.<p>At one point you might feel out of the trend for not building a mobile or web app but I guess what matters is that your app helps someone, regardless of it being a web, mobile or desktop app.
There may be a diminishing audience of consumer desktop users, but I don't see the business audience of desktop users dwindling. But B2B enterprise software doesn't get the coverage of fast-growing consumer startups. Are there industry-specific news sources to uncover some of this? I have a few web apps that target business, and they simply wouldn't ever be utilized on a mobile device. There's some things that presently and always will require a desktop setup.
Nylas are, in addition to their open source sync engine: <a href="https://nylas.com/" rel="nofollow">https://nylas.com/</a>
Medical imaging desktop app
<a href="http://www.truelifeanatomy.com.au/software/software-overview/" rel="nofollow">http://www.truelifeanatomy.com.au/software/software-overview...</a>
We built it 10+ yrs back and we are still waiting for the big break which I guess in the medical field will come only once the big boys die off.. too many entrenched interests.
Curse Voice: <a href="http://beta.cursevoice.com/" rel="nofollow">http://beta.cursevoice.com/</a>
We are building a cross platform communication app specifically for gamers. Currently only the Windows desktop application is publicly available. Mac, iOS, and Android are all in development and will be available soon.
We are! <a href="http://fetching.io" rel="nofollow">http://fetching.io</a><p>Granted our desktop app is a highly customized version of our hosted web app. We use NWJS to package up our Meteor app (along with elastic search and mongo) to create a secure, local-only version of our personal web search tool.
We have a product that provides licensing and copy protection for desktop apps <a href="http://www.licensespot.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.licensespot.com</a><p>We've been growing our customer base steadily. So the answer is yes, lots of startups doing desktop apps.
Sia: siacoin.com<p>github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia<p>We're ultimately trying to build a decentralized object store Platform, but our initial approach is a desktop application. We're hoping that the majority of embedded and streamed content on the web is stored on and fetched from our Platform.
Close.io -- <a href="http://close.io" rel="nofollow">http://close.io</a><p>We have a native Mac and Windows app which uses Chromium embedded to wrap our core web app then adds our call stack (based on PJSIP) so you can make sales calls right within the app.
AeroFS on multiple platforms including MacOS, Windows & Linux <a href="https://www.aerofs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.aerofs.com/</a>
Pinegrow is a new desktop app from a startup, but I'm not sure if they have VC backing.<p><a href="http://pinegrow.com/" rel="nofollow">http://pinegrow.com/</a>
Actually most are making native mobile apps. I'm a mobile guy making a cross compatible web app. Why anyone would make a native app in our world of ECMAScript6 and HTML5 is beyond me.