A5 For Income

[Al Weaver]

I've been messing around with A4 and A5 for a mumber of years, and am now considering getting serious. Assuming I was technically savvy, is there a reasonable ability out there to make an income with A5? Is there a need for the stuff A5 can do, and what is that market? I assume A5 is the tool.
I'd sure appreciate any answers, long or short.

[Jeff Moses]

RE: A5 For Income

Al, Check out our web site at www.dealershipsoftware.com. In addition to what you see there we have a real estate app in a kiosk format that we build and get monthly listing update fees for, health club apps, and touch screen direcectoy kiosk app for trade shows that we place and enter exhibitor data for in exchange for advertising rights to the show exhibitors, and are now working on a repair estimator for RVs. We have found that it is much more lucrative to design an applcation that can be sold to many as opposed to a custom app for a single user. This allows a more competitive price. We have been marketing our apps for over 2 1/2 years. Our company is now at the point where we have to pick and choose what app we are going to work on next. The business comes to us. There are an unlimited number of apps out there just begging to be written and as you can see and only limited to ones imagination. If you are serious and would like more info on how we market, demo, and protect our apps reply to this post. If there are enough replies maybe I'll write an article for Dr. Wayne's page to include marketing costs sources and ideas we use for additional income on apps we call monthly support fees.
Jeff

[Jeff Moses]

RE: A5 For Income

I have received several inquiries concernig this post addressed to my email address. I will try to answer all of them asap and I welcome all questions. I do think however it would be a better idea to post future inquries to this board so that all interested can benifit from from the information exchange.
Jeff

[crimmelcp]

RE: A5 For Income

Jeff: Posted your reply as requested.
What part of Southern Ohio?
We are looking at the possibility of using touch screens with alpha5 and employee time cards.

----- original email-----
Jeff:
I saw your post on the alpha board.
You mentioned something about a realestate app.
Do you have a demo or information I could look at.
I would like to try to market a real estate app to some local agancies.
Charlie Crimmel

Hi Charlie,
We don't have a real-estate demo but I can give details about what it needed to include and how we update the listings in it and charge for the service. We built our own touch screen kiosks and linked up with Coldwell
Bankers in southern Ohio where they were responsible for placing the units.
The first one went to a Giant Eagle supermarket lobby. If you could post this question to the A5 board I would be happy to give details and I could answer other emails regarding this topic at the same time.
Jeff

[Stephen Williams]

RE: A5 For Income

Jeff-
I really enjoyed this post as I am headed towards selling a package for the small business contractor and among my concerns are:
1. Security of the intellectual property
2. Repair of glitches by ignorant use
3. Training of new users (I assume this comes after 2. above)
4. What to include in a price package - training, support, upgrade
5. There is a market with Alpha Five where the end user could make thier OWN modifications, but how do you maintain security of the intellectual property - you would have to give full access to the control panel with functions, menus, scripts etc (albeit password protected, but how secure IS that?) Create a seperate database application just for them?
6. keeping track of modifications we make to the core package plus customized modifications
7. Breaking a large package into seperate modules. Mine has two or three now, another in the works. Not everyone wants everything...
8. I am inclined to work with businesses I can DRIVE to versus dial into via PcAnywhere or whatever. Certainly to start.
9. I am inclined to give three or four copies out for free to get my feet wet in the new business, and hopefully trap the worst start up glitches (what are they??)

I actually think this topic is pretty huge, and I am hoping that with version five we will see Alpha Five emerge as a recognized application platform. This would be great news for A5 developers and would warrant a seperate forum for these issues...Wouldn't THAT be nice! It would mean we were all very busy!!$$

More generically:
When scoping out a job what parameters do you look for to quantify an estimate?
a) number of forms, and reports?
b) number of fields and tables?
c) number of users?
d) sophistication of user?
e) complexity of integration and degree of query or analysis?
How do you quantify these things?

I do estimating for landscape construction and have a package of assemblies; I bet the concept would translate to database development.
In landscaping the process begins with a visit to evaluate needs versus skills of both parties. I make this one free. The question to answer is do we have reason to do business, and what would that business be?
Then the clock starts (ideally) and we prepare a proposal of what we think would be a good landscape with enough detail so we can put a price on it. Design fees as appropriate.
We also bid on other peoples designs (free estimates in these cases)
In estimating we break the job down into small quantifiable tasks such as planting one 5 gallon plant with all the labor and material involved, then multiply by the number of 5 gallon plants neeeded. There are industry standards published for most tasks (RS Means company specializes here)

Does any of this thinking make any sense in database development? I could hack out a database design of tables and sets so I could prove an information solution - one fee. Then build the forms and reports, costs based on fields per form or report. How long does it take to build a form? Sorry folks, but I am willing to bet that after a year of this there will be less than 2% variation in time to build a form...The time differences will mostly be because there was not enough planning put into creating the tables and sets..

I will stop there and see what you folks think...

Steve

[Jeff Moses]

RE: A5 For Income

Steve, Looks like you have done alot of thinking on the subject and pose good questions that we many A5 developers would like some input on. Your request addresses many issues all of which we have needed to contend with and have found solid solutions for. It will take a while to write up a complete response. It might be a day or two before I finish it but I will post it as a fresh post called Marketing your application. I'll probably send it off to Dr. Wayne also and ask him if he would be kind enough to add it to his page.
Jeff

[Jeff Moses]

Touch screen

Charlie, The last app we had running was in the Bordman, Youngstown area. We have since discontinued that particular app in lieu of moving it to a web based presence. As far as touch screen apps go there is really nothing special about using the technology with the exception designing your app to be run completely with buttons if you do not make a mouse available to the user. The touch screen itself is broken up into coordinates and when touched reads then as a mouse would so by touch a button on the screen it would be the same as a left click of the mouse. It is also VERY important to build double click protection into your button scripts as that was our biggest enemy. The user would tap the button a few times and run several copies of the script. If you use at the beginning of each script and at the end it will prevent this problem. Another issue to deal with is the user being able to get back to the systems desktop (not a good thing!) We use an on screen keyboard for all user input other that pushing a button. We also remove all file menu bars to prevent access to the control panel or A5 shutdown. These menu bars are not very practical for touch apps anyway as you will find out unless you use a system that uses a touch pen or tool to operate with. Finger touch needs a more general target to work well. Let me know if you would like more info on the on screen keyboard and I'll tell you how to set it up.
Jeff

[crimmelcp]

RE: Touch screen

Jeff:
yes I would like to know more about the screen keyboard.
I have meeting in Atlanta the rest of this week to discuss the electronic time sheets using touch screen.
Any information that you could email me or post would be appreciated.
Thanks
Charlie Crimmel

[Jeff Moses]

RE: Touch screen

Charlie, You could probably write a keyboard in A% but we have found it to be a very complicated operation and it was just quicker for us to use a third party software. We tried a number of different ones but finally settled on Netshift. Netshift specailizes in on screen keyboards for developers apps, or they did at the time we got it. You can design several different keyboards and just run the one you need from within you A5 app. You can find it by search Netshift on the web. If you have any trouble let me know and I'll see if I can look up our records.
Jeff

[Tom Hlavin]

RE: A5 For Income

Stephen,

I'm Tom Hlavin, Jeff's partner in Interactive Information Systems, Inc. Jeff and I work together quite well as a team. I provide the discipline that works with the user interface of A5 (I can do a lot with A5 graphically, but I'm not good at scripting) and can smoothly interpret what the customer wants and put it into language that Jeff needs to script the solution. I'm also the person that deals directly with our customers, providing technical and training support, incorportating suggestions from our network of dealer users and setting up trade show visits, interactive presentation demos and anything else you need to market your application. That's a pretty big job when we now have applications in 20 states.

I could never go over the breadth of marketing your application in this response. I will try, however, to work with Jeff and come up with guidelines that have worked for us, and depending on the application, might work for you.

One thing I have heard, though, is that A5 is exactly the program to be using for applications--based on how jazzed Jeff came back from the most recent A5 conference. I was in Louisville, KY at an industry trade show during that week and everytime I spoke to Jeff from there he would let me know that A5 is going to do exactly what our customers and prospects need it to do. I'll let you in on those things soon. If you like, you can call me at my office, 9a-5p EST at 440-729-2029 for additional info. It's frankly easier for me to answer via voice than via the board. Jeff finds it easier to use the board, but he's a computer nerd.

[Al Weaver]

RE: A5 For Income


Jeff--

Got your fast response response, which answered my questions in spades. I'm excited to dig in and get busy. The response you generated has utterly amazed me. Apparently,the answer is: GO !!

Thanks a lot Al

[Jim Chapman]

RE: Touch screen

Hi Charlie,

I don't know what fuctionality you want in your keyboard, but I and another developer did an app with a screen keyboard in A5 and it works well for our purposes. You just create a 'keyboard' on a form. The keys are buttons. Pressing a key runs a very simple bit of code that appends the key's value to a field. The basic part of the app is totally touch screen, there is no 'real' keyboard present, just the simulated keyboard on the form. In this app, the keyboard form is for inputing client names when a scanned in ID card is missing or doesn't fuction.

Good luck

Jim Chapman

[CALocklin]

RE: A5 For Income

"Is there a need for the stuff A5 can do"

I'm too busy right now to answer this question because I'm overloaded with development work for customers.

As for marketing products: I'd like to know more about that myself.

(I really shouldn't be 'wasting time' reading this message board but I just couldn't stand getting too far behind. Unfortunately, I haven't always been this busy.)