Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

• Lunar

  192 4,323 8.9 Swift

  Intelligent adaptive brightness for your external monitors

I do! I started earning real money after I created the first monitor control app for Apple Silicon (https://lunar.fyi).

I wrote about my journey to doing that here: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/

I quit my job in April 2020 and nowadays I make desktop apps on https://lowtechguys.com/

Each app brings about $200/month in revenue at the start, then ramps up as I work on user feedback and telling people about the apps in whichever way I can.

For example rcmd (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd) just reached $1.5k/month because it has a more complete feature set than it had in v1 and because more people are recommended it to their peers.

• hammerspoon

  114 11,479 7.3 Objective-C

  Staggeringly powerful macOS desktop automation with Lua

  

Thanks! While this feature isn't really in the scope of Lunar, it can be achieved with a more automation generic app like Hammerspoon (https://www.hammerspoon.org/)

I created a simple script here that does just that: https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/UigtG5/xdr.lua

And you can install it with the following commands:

    mkdir -p ~/.hammerspoon

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project