Me, for one.

I prefer and Android app.

If we do one platform, then we would probably do both.

But this is the second request in 3 months. Not exactly a lot of motivation for us to spend months of development time on it.

I absolutely think you should develop your program for use with iPad as well as for Mac. Everyone is getting on the Apple bandwagon and there is no program like yours available.

Having explored various routes to allow me to have access to my PSM on my iMac and MacBook including a disastrous attempt to partition my hard drive, I remain amazed that such a successful program should still not have an app. to allow Mac-users to have access to it.

The challenge when you are a two person company with a codebase that's taken over 26000+ man-hours to create over 15 years, how do we fund the effort to recreate /all/ of that on the iPad.

NONE of the code we have written, not the portfolio manager, not the plugin system, nor the active securities, the trading interfaces, the management code nor the rather involved charting package (which we created from scratch) can be re-used.

iPad development is strictly done in Objective-C. All our code, all many thousands of files and hundreds of thousands of lines, is written in C++.

We're only two guys.

Find me 10,000 users willing to pre-pay $49.95 for an iPad version of PSM (or an investor will to fund the effort for a percentage) and we can probably make it happen one way or another.

Howdy Yermo,

What about the iMac and MacBook, which were mentioned in the previous message? Don't these have C++ compilers?

It would seriously cost you $500,000 to move PSM to the Apple iPad???

According to a message in the StackOverflow message boards in Oct of 2008:

"You don't need to recode everything to Objective-C. There's a strange bastardization of C++ and Objective-C that will allow you to use C++ code from Objective-C, so you could intelligently split up the model code in C++ and view/controller code in Objective-C. To use Objective-C, just suffix your source code files with .mm instead of .m, and you can intermix most legal C++ and Objective-C syntax even on the same line."

You two guys have created what is simply THE BEST stock tracking program on the planet! One would think that considering the expansion of PSM to Apple products would be a profitable venture, adding to your existing user base.

But if you think the conversion, debugging and testing is gonna cost you $500K, then I guess not.

You have to look at it from a more holistic point of view. Maybe some would say I'm being defeatist but it's not just a case of the language. It's also the GUI toolkits. You still end up doing a complete rewrite.

$500K is probably optimistic for an stock tracking platform of this complexity. I figure we would need to hire 3 developers and employ them for a year or more to recreate what we have on Windows. Have you seen the rates IOS developers command these days? $130K+/year. Maybe not everything needs to be done to the same level but that doesn't seem right. Then there's the whole script extension system. VBA on iPad? I doubt it. COM? All the data services? Trading? Collabinvest? reports? etc?

Under Mac OSX we could run under Wine (which works now I'm told) but on the iPad we're looking at yet another completely different environment.

And it's not just the development. Then to make the investment worth it we have to market it and gain a foothold in the Mac universe which also costs a bunch of money. It's a huge undertaking.

I just don't know if we can get away with doing something simple (like everyone else). I think our customers would expect something of the same complexity as what we have under Windows. That's just a huge investment.

Thanks for your reply Yermo.

Nothing is ever as easy as it seems from the "outside", like I learned while writing PSM script extensions.

Had no idea what IOS developers made. That's an eye-opener by itself! Good for them, bad for a company who requires their services

-Don

Yea, at least in the DC region no one, I mean no one, can find developers. They are all gainfully employed. $130K will get you a good one. Not a great one.

It's kind of nuts.

Before any consideration is given to an i-Pad version, why not streamline the Windows version:

1. User's manual is in need of some serious work.

2. Not everyone can download their price data. Hence the ability the enter this data manually should offered as an alternative.

3. Is the Windows version the very best it can really be in terms of efficiency and simplicity?

4. Eliminate the confusion that crops up by having just one version of the program.

I spent some more time thinking about this, just as an idle exercise. It'd be so much more work than I was initially thinking.

(We've been having these discussions internally for some time. Inevitably we underestimate how much work is involved and overestimate how quickly we can get things done.)

It's not a "move" to the iPad. It's a complete rewrite/re-development.

Personal Stock Monitor is a /huge/ system with a ridiculous number of components.

Everything we've built would have to be redeveloped from scratch in Objective-C and the UI redesigned for the pads.

It's more like $1M to $1.5M, probably a lot more if you consider having to pay a loaded rate.

5 guys working for a year to get a good part of it done. I figure 10,000 man hours at least.

And that wouldn't be for all of it. Many features would have to get sacrificed and it just wouldn't be up to the level that PSM is on WIndows.

It would be a such huge undertaking.

Yea, it's not happening; at least not without some serious funding and getting a much larger development team in place. There's no way we could do it as a two man team.

Yea, the documentation could use a lot of help.

And I agree an easier way of manually entering price data would be a good addition.

We have multiple versions of the program. Standard and Gold in addition to the Streamer. The streamer will be discontinued at some point though.

And I saw the comment about C++ in Objective-C. Unfortunately the vast majority of the code is tightly tied to Windows-centric ways of doing things.

So having some language compatibility wouldn't be of much help.

I understand all that you've written Yermo, as I was a one-man software development company for many years, in the old mini-computer field.

Taking a step back from Apple-specific development, have you considered tablets in general? I know zero about any tablets, so please excuse my ignorance. Do they all use similar development languages, whereby only the GUI and OS-specific calls would need to be specific to a specific vendor?

This must be a very tough time for small development companies that would LOVE to have their successful apps running on tablets too. Especially if they are forced to pick only one specific vendor / OS