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Ask HN: help me set the price for TotalFinder

2 points by woid ↗ HN
Hi, I'm a current maintainer of the Visor project and the guy behind http://binaryage.com.

These rainy days I'm working on TotalFinder which is augmented Finder.app (http://totalfinder.binaryage.com).

I had that crazy idea that maybe it is so cool that someone would actually pay for it. Why? I would probably pay for it and there is also quite many happy Visor users out there.

Because it is a product for hackers, I want to ask here how much are you potentially willing to spend for it. To be specific imagine it already has that dual-panel feature (see the feature list of on the site):

5 comments

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access_denied
Sorting dir listings by ASCII (or how this is called) big Names befor lowercas names; that would be a useful feature for me at least. I don't know how much I would trust an app to essentially taking over my system though.
sailormoon
Looks like a great set of improvements, especially the folder sort (though i'd want that as an option) and the intriguing command line integration - I currently use the excellent cdto (http://code.google.com/p/cdto/) but integrated would be even better.

I'm sorry to say, though, that there's no way I would install it as a SIMBL hack. I'm very conservative on work machines - they are my livelihood, after all - and they tend to have highly intricate setups which are time-consuming to redo. Thus, SIMBL and anything like it (eg. "haxies") are verboten. Finder is basic enough to make it doubly sacrosanct.

So the question's sort of moot. If it were a proper Finder replacement I might be interested. But I doubt that could ever be worth anything like the dev time for you, if it was even possible for a single person to reimplement a piece of software that large and complex.

Sorry if that's not exactly the answer you were looking for ..

sashx
I'm not really interested in the .DS_store hack, only in the dual panel. I would happily donate 20EUR if you release the source. Coming from Linux, I really cannot stand Mac shareware that gets abandoned and cannot be fixed to work on updated systems. And also, since it goes deep in the Finder, I would only trust it if I could check the code.
lostsync
I've been using it for about two days. I've been using Visor since 10.4 and was pretty excited to stumble upon this while setting up a new MBP and installing all of my staple apps.

Would I pay for it? I might donate and often do to FOSS projects I get a lot out of (my machines make my money, so it's worth it), but given the amount of open source you've got in this plugin (Visor code and now Chromium), I'd probably just pirate it if you started trying to force me to give you money, out of pure spite. I'm not entirely sure that you could even get around the licensing issues from the other code you're using (but maybe you can; I don't know).

woid
Are you serious? There is nothing wrong with using code from Visor or Chromium in closed-source commercial app. They have liberal licenses.

In binaryage.com I've created like 5 serious open-source tools being used by 50k developers daily (most of them probably also making money with them). And I've got back less than $50 in donations during last 6 months. This is not a viable model if I want to support myself working on similar tools in the future.