From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: September 5, 2012 10:32:43 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: Astro IIDC 4.09.00 site updated

Hi Guys;

I have basically zero revenue Revenue coming in from sales of Astro IIDC since The Venus transit in June - so what am I supposed to do here to keep paying my bills?

The Lions share of my contract work (which is the only thing keeping Astro IIDC afloat) over the past 4 years was paid for by USA organizations , like Nasa, Navy, Army, White Sands Missile Range, Homeland Security and medical companies (which needed clearance from the FDA for their projects) through contractors. Very little comes from "big greedy corporations" - the rest came from small privately owned companies that might have 3 to 30 employees and are doing Niche market stuff. This was all funded by the government revenues. I was told by my contacts with these various groups that they knew their budgets were going to be slashed, if there was a change in government. That is what the told me 6 months before the election and is what happened. Companies do not want Mac developers anymore because they can read the writing on the wall.

Apple only factors in here because they have discontinued both QuickTime and now QTKit, and will lock the platform down completely (ie. software will be sold on the Apple Store only). The announcement that I had been expecting was made official yesterday on the Apple QuickTime list - QTKit is now end of lifed in Mountain Lion. The replacement AVFoundation only works with horribly compressed MP4 video and has no plugin architectures or ability to do anything except MP4 video. It's buggy and has exceedingly poor samples and documentation if any. To mitigate that I have to build my own movie file format to replace it - including players and converters to convert the video to MP4 which is all that Apple will support going forward.

As to alternative funding options that people keep talking about , I don't see any but I am willing to hear them out. I already explained that there simply are not enough existing customers over the past 4 years  to generate enough revenue with a subscription model of $100 per year pay for development and support going forward. I also believe that I have reached all the Mac imagers that there are that do Image science, which is in the low hundreds of users. Check the number of subscribers on the Mac astronomy lists hosted by Yahoo (MacAstronomers, Equinox, Astro IIDC) and there aren't more than 400 subscribers per list. And if I increase my price, people will just switch to Windows where they provide a capture Application with the cameras and it's "good enough". That is where people are going especially in a tough economic climate.

If I take a full time job, I will not have the energy or time at the end of the day to do massive architectural changes that Apple will enforce going froward. So the only way this works is that Astro IIDC generates enough revenue to continue to pay the bills.

So what "options" am I missing here?

Milton J. Aupperle