I’ve previously written extensively about taking an analytical approach to the pricing of software products. In this article,  I want to cover specifically the type of products we list on Binpress – libraries, SDKs and other source-code components for various development needs.

Knowing Your Audience

There are many types of software products – games, productivity software, security products and so forth. Libraries, SDKs and other source-code products are generally categorized as developer tools.

Each category of software products appeals to a different audience and serves different needs. Developer tools are aimed, naturally, at developers (or software companies) and are more often than not a type of productivity software -  they help developers achieve more in less time.

Lets examine some common characteristics of software developers:
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We’ve done a major push of new features to the service today, so if you noticed the site being offline just a while ago, now you know the reason why. Lets recap what has changed and added:

Component page overhaul

We’ve reworked the component page look-and-feel to match the new theme we’ve had in the homepage for a while now. In addition to visual changes, we’ve added several new features:

• Visitors can now create feature requests and engage in discussion about it with the developer and other visitors. We’ve noticed similar discussion going on in the comments and wanted to provide a better platform to do so.
• Issues can now be accessed directly from the component profile, in order to be access in context and to encourage using tickets instead of comments to report problems.
• User reviews have been expanded to show more information, including a breakdown of review scores.
• Publishers can now migrate comments to either issues or feature requests – use this option to clean up your comments.

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Note: this post is mainly targeted towards our Binpress publishers, but is relevant for anyone who publishes their own software product (or service).

The success of our components varies widely, from high-volume selling / downloaded components to relative unknowns. The amount of sales / downloads a component generates is a factor of both the traffic it gets and how well that traffic is being converted to a purchase / download.

We’ve previously covered several ways in which you can get your component noticed and generate additional traffic to it (and we’ll be revisiting it soon), and this time I’d like to attack the other part of the equation – converting your component traffic into goal completions (either a purchase or a download).

So what can you do to improve your components performance?
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We finally have our mobile contest winners!

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who participated, we had many great entries and our judges had their work cut out for them deciding on the best ones.

3rd place award:

Our 3rd place prize goes to Kemal Taskin with RadioTunes SDK for iOS – a radio streaming engine with support for the http and mms protocols. One of our judges wrote:

Compared with the other components this is one that provides the greatest value to a developer because of the complexity of interfacing with FFmpeg.

The 3rd place award is a package worth over 3,500$, including 500$ in cash.

Runner-up award:

Our runner-up award goes to Yaroslav Sivokhin with AsyncMVP – an asynchronous message-based module system base on an MVP template for the android platform. The judges really liked this one -

For me this project is a highlight, since although it seems to be in an early stage of development, turns Android application development on its head and introduces modern programming paradigms that have proven successful for years to the Android world. It’s a bold move into a completely new direction of Android app development, and I’m excited to see where this is going.

The runner-up award is a package worth close to 6,000$, including 1,000$ in cash.

Grand prize winner:

Our grand prize goes to Nick Lockwood with iCarousel. iCarousel is a simple, highly customizable, data-driven 3D carousel view for both iOS and Mac OS. Quoting one of the judges:

This is a really great submission – it provides a unique UI element that is highly customizable and looks really good. The code is great, very easy to understand and use, and aligns with many iOS design patterns.

The grand prize award is a huge package worth close to 11,500$, including 1,500$ in cash.

Thanks again to all the participants and the judges who helped us make this contest a success and our great sponsors who made this contest possible. Specifically, we would like to thank Amazon AWS, Tropo and Appsfire for their significant contributions and our other sponsors. We look forward to continuing this tradition and bring you great prizes for the best contributions of source-code.

This is a guest post by Ralph Chapin, a Binpress publisher. Ralph has developed project management software from 1977 to 2002 at a series of known companies and most recently at Artemis International Solutions Corporation. Lately, Ralph works mostly in Java, with his latest passion being multi-threading.

Java lists in real world applications

It started with large numbers of large lists – people, equipment, payments, jobs, work orders,… the usual – and a program that had to juggle them all. At any given time, most of the lists might be very small or empty, while some would be huge. While the program ran, many of the lists would yo-yo dramatically in size, putting a severe strain on memory management. Of course, the idea was to handle as much data as possible with the best performance possible for whatever machine it happened to run on.
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After a long hiatus, Binpress contests are back – and this time our theme is mobile development. We are giving away 20k$ in cash and prizes from companies such as Amazon, Tropo, Appsfire, Github and many more!
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