Death of Versiontracker

[Mark Schonewille]

Hi,

This is no news. The process started 2 years ago and has now been completed. The only goal of the merge was to take out a competitor. It is sad indeed, because I was a happy user of VersionTracker. VT helped me to publish software and generate money. C|Net makes this impossible, unless I am willing to pay for their services, which I am not. From experience, I must say that C|Net's services are of very low quality, the support department is largely disfunctional, the developer portal is broken in many places (I'm unable to update my old products at the moment), and your new software is listed after a very long delay, when you're about to release yet another version already. If you don't pay, your software will never appear on the front page. All this is very different from what VT once was.

Because I saw this coming, I made a start with my own software publishing site. I would like to encourage you all to enter your software at http://www.quickestpublisher.com . I promise: the more software titles are entered, the better I will make the website. Of course, RunRev developers will enjoy special benefits (possibilities I'm considereing are: special offers, RunRev-compatible API, plug-ins, etc).

--
Best regards,

Mark Schonewille

Economy-x-Talk Consulting and Software Engineering
Homepage: http://economy-x-talk.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/xtalkprogrammer
KvK: 50277553

Download the Installer Maker plugin for Runtime Revolution at http://qurl.tk/ce Create installers for Mac and Windows on *every* Rev-compatible platform. No additional software needed.

On 8 sep 2010, at 16:45, Andre Garzia wrote:

> That is really sad. Versiontracker was way ahead of the similar sites.
> I really enjoyed working with it.
> 
> I went to the new CNET site and guess what, two softwares I built
> still there but with the wrong dl count :-/
> 
> BlogWorkz
> http://download.cnet.com/BlogWorkz/3000-10440_4-10254441.html?tag=mncol
> 
> iBlog
> http://download.cnet.com/iBlog-Classic/3000-2155_4-20585.html?tag=mncol
> 
> There's an interesting story there. Once upon a time, when blogs were
> not as mainstream as they are today, back in Mac OS 9, I created the
> first blog client for the Macintosh. I think I was one of the first
> developers to support Pyra/Blogger API 1.0. The software was called
> iBlog and was done with REALBasic (this is before me migrating my
> development to Rev).
> 
> iBlog was quite successful but times marched on and Mac OS X was
> released. The first REALBasic release for Mac OS X was quite buggy so
> I decided to learn Objective-C/Cocoa to develop a native client and so
> BlogWorkz was built. BlogWorkz is basically a clone of iBlog
> implemented in a different toolkit.
> 
> For a while, I controlled a big chunk of the blog client for mac
> ecosystem and it was fun because I controlled the competition because
> I made both clients and improved them like matching features on each
> other for a while. Some people started saying that BlogWorkz was
> better, others saying that iBlog was there first and was more stable,
> many never noticed that a single developer built both clients... I had
> mischievous fun seeing this happen because both clients were hosted at
> the same domain and no one noticed.
> 
> Later I discovered Rev and reimplemented BlogWorkz in Rev. I also
> created BRP (Blog Research Project) in Rev which is a basic iBlog
> reimplementation done in a single day. I never released the new
> version because these days there are so many blog clients available
> that it is not worth to implement all the features they have just for
> the sake of competition.
> 
> VersionTracker was my main source of customers. MacUpdate never came
> close. I'd spend my morning looking on the web for high profile
> macintosh bloggers, I would send them a free copy of my software and
> kindly ask for a review and feedback. This practice was responsible
> for maybe 30% of the sales, the rest was people searching
> VersionTracker. Till today, BlogWorkz still sells a license or two per
> year. I usually refund them and give the guys a serial anyway, it is
> no longer supported.