Mac App Store?

Could this thread be locked? with a message something like.. "Don't ask for Mac App Store, it's not going to happen. Move on to more important things, thank you".
 
Mr Micawber's recipe for happiness: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.", with appropriate substitutions of 100% (happiness), 70% (misery) and 'an insult' (result), is I proffer, apt here.

Dr Wengenmayer puts 100% of his effort into making Cheetah 3D the accessible and full featured program that it is, and he should not be palmed off with 70% by Apple for his pains.
 
It's called "Customer Feedback" and it's how people who use a product let the people who make the product know what they want. Not everyone wants the same things you do.
 
I've already said it before. The 30% fee was just a minor point for me to leave the MAS. So completely forwarding the fees to the user wouldn't solve my problems with the MAS. Even if Apple would lower the fees to 10% I would probably still reject it.

I can absolutely understand the point of view of a MAS customer but please keep in mind that I'm also a customer. A customer of Apples software distribution service and I'm anything but happy about that.

P.S. Starting with macOS Catalina the MAS will be 100% free of any reasonably featured 3D modelling, rendering and animation suite (some old 32bit 3D apps will drop out). It's 4 years ago that I warned Apple that this will happen. They didn't care 4 years ago they don't care today.
 
Martin, I fully understand and support your decision. As a retired developer, I understand the entire process you go through to make these types of decisions as well. Also as a retired developer, I understand the value of customer feedback, even when it is feedback that I don't agree with nor want to hear. I suggest you don't lock this thread just because some people voice an opinion you, or in this case, some other user, don't agree with.
 
Dr Wengenmayer,

Further to your comment "They didn't care 4 years ago they don't care today", I think Apple's open contempt for the Graphics market, goes much further than their dismissal of the 3D market.

They are totally obsessed with money and money making - gone are the halcyon days of Job's return, when innovation was the driving ethos.

I jumped from the Tramiel Atari/Falcon train onto the Apple, at the beginning of the 21st century (coz it seemed a natural progression) with the Blue and White G3 and a wonderful G4 upgraded Pismo laptop.

In those days Mac Format and other magazines were full of snide remarks about the merits of OS 9 and the CPU "it can do in one clock, what the PC has to use two clocks for".

How things have changed - greed is a very dark aspect of human nature and the creeps of Cupertino are dripping black slime with it from every corporate orifice.

I have no idea what language or languages that Cheetah is written in, but is it beyond the practical bounds of possibility for you and your stalwart helpers to port it to the PC platform, where you could take advantage of the much more efficient GPUs and much more boyant 3D market?
 
Martin has been asked many times over the years about a Windows version, and has always maintained that he has his hands full just with the Mac version. I'm sure there's other reasons as well. So unless things have changed, it's probably very unlikely.
 
Martin has been asked many times over the years about a Windows version, and has always maintained that he has his hands full just with the Mac version. I'm sure there's other reasons as well. So unless things have changed, it's probably very unlikely.
Paul P,

Thanks for that update.
 
Martin, I fully understand and support your decision. As a retired developer, I understand the entire process you go through to make these types of decisions as well. Also as a retired developer, I understand the value of customer feedback, even when it is feedback that I don't agree with nor want to hear. I suggest you don't lock this thread just because some people voice an opinion you, or in this case, some other user, don't agree with.

I agree to all that, but from my point of view after reading the whole thread, there isn't much that can be said anymore. Martin knows there's a good percentage of his users that would like to see the app in the Apple store. I'm betting that if it was in his hands it would be there, it could only be beneficial (more sales), but he also states the there are very strong reasons why he decided to stay away and those reasons haven't changed, and it doesn't look like they're going to change. So in that light, what good comes from repeating "I would like to buy it from the Mac app store, I would pay 30% more for it" etc? It won't happen and the reasons are beyond the developers control.

I rather see Martin spending time with more important things, like new features (the wish list section of this forum) and bug fixing, than explaining over and over the same thing.

Of course he could just ignore this thread and let the users vent, and simply quote his previous comments from time to time.
 
I don't believe I've ever considered looking on the Apple app store for a 3D program --- though, I may now :)

From a marketing perspective:
Early on, the apps available on the App store seemed more like novelties to me. If I'm looking for a serious app, I first go to a search engine, e.g. Google to learn and compare.

In terms of gaining greater exposure and sales, it may be more cost effective to do targeted ad campaigns than to hand over 30% to Apple just to be on their App Store.

From a convenience standpoint:
Installing from a download DMG has never been an issue for me, so I cannot really relate to that aspect of convenience.
The few apps that I use for production everyday are each installed via downloaded DMG. After the initial installation from DMG, a couple of them will do patch updates from within the app -- just requiring re-launch of app.

I've not encountered the issue with having to re-enter the registration key. Except once, when my 8-year old iMac kicked the bucket, I couldn't find my registration key. But I emailed Martin, and he sent it to me right away. (As a side note, my experience has been that developers NOT on the App Store have provided better customer service.)

Using the right tool for the job
This thread reminds of other threads on here where the writer complains a lot about Cheetah3D lacking a certain function or feature.
There are features I'd really like to see implemented, as well --- particularly, volumetrics ;)
However, I understand the importance of picking the right tool (app) for the job. It makes no sense to get frustrated with the developer :)

Bottomline, if Cheetah3D doesn't have something I need, I'm free to choose another 3D app that does. But I keep coming back to Cheetah3D.
 
As said before, I understand why people prefer the app store. At the same time every (!) app I use for my work is not in the store (at least for some graphic apps to my advantage. I can freely change between mac and windows (at least one even linux) without an additional license). Neither the one or the other should really be a show stopper.

Now Martin stated many, many times that he will not return to the app store and that his reasons is not the steep provision while retaining that he will (probably) never disclose the real reason he left. His business, his app, his decision. Everybody else has to accept it, as he has to accept that some people may not buy his product because it isn't in the store. It's simple as that and more or less stated already repeated times in other words. Nevertheless this question is coming up again and again (as does the one about a windows version). That it gets a bit long in the tooth for most forum participants should be very, very clear from this thread.

Now what I really would like to know (and why I answer) is this: Is Cheetah the only app you use that you didn't get from the app store? If so, isn't that a bit limiting?

(As an aside. It's not meant disrespectful or so, even if it may sound so, not unfriendly in any way. I'm genuinly interested in the answer):

Or, if not, which is what I expect, do you also ask this question in other product forums repeated times? Or is it just Martin that you hassle with it?
 
There's a long discussion here.

https://www.cheetah3d.com/forum/index.php?threads/11132/

I understand the business standpoint but I also preferred the Mac App Store approach. Now that it's not in the App Store anymore, every time I dock my work laptop into my iMac pro via target boot mode, Cheetah 3D thinks it's a new computer and I have to enter the serial number again.

For the App Store, it only asks for my Apple ID password once, but with sideloaded apps like Cheetah 3D, I need to have a text file ready to copy-paste serial numbers. I wouldn't mind that much if it would just be DRM-Free. Recently had a problem with Sketch (which also left the App Store years ago) where I couldn't re-activate the Software because their DRM servers weren't available. Sideloading is fine, but third-party DRM is poison as it adds additional work/maintenance overhead and relies on the availability of the company's DRM servers, especially if there is additional data collection (like the hardware ID of the computer it's installed on) involved.
You can use the iCloud Keychain's notes feature to record licences side-loading along with user-IDs and passwords for apps that need them. Because I have a couple of Macs on the same iCloud account, the licences are always there, even for when I buy a replacement Mac.
 
At the risk of beating a long dead horse, this is an interesting piece..
Its interesting, but I think a couple of his points are flawed/down to the choice of libraries he has choosen.
Paddle should be the only part of the system that knows anything about credit card numbers, so any breach is Paddles responsibility, and given the nature of Paddles business you can be sure that PCI is auditing them yearly, as Unbounded I would never expect to see a credit card number.
There is no reason your app "needs to phone home" this is a choice you make in how you trust your users and how dreconian you wish your DRM to be, at the end of the dat the author of the article has chosen this route. has made.

Just my opinion of course.
 
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There's always the free open source KeePass (KeePassX)
Not nearly as slick of an interface as 1Password, but I think it has most of the functionality.

1Password does still have the permanent licenses for sale. They are just sneaky and hide the way to buy it. I think you have to download the trial first and then go through one of the menus in the app to buy the permanent serial. I just did this a few months ago to upgrade from v6 to v7. Unless they've removed it in the last few weeks / months since I've bought it.
 
1Password does still have the permanent licenses for sale. They are just sneaky and hide the way to buy it. I think you have to download the trial first and then go through one of the menus in the app to buy the permanent serial. I just did this a few months ago to upgrade from v6 to v7. Unless they've removed it in the last few weeks / months since I've bought it

I've been using 1Password since 2009 - but I didn't upgrade to v7 because I'm tired of being required to subscribe to software. Reading this gave me hope so I installed it. I can't find the permanent/perpetual work-around. Do you have any more hints? If not, the price is pretty reasonable and I'll just live with it.
Sorry for posting non-C3D stuff here.

--shift studio.
 
I've been using 1Password since 2009 - but I didn't upgrade to v7 because I'm tired of being required to subscribe to software. Reading this gave me hope so I installed it. I can't find the permanent/perpetual work-around. Do you have any more hints? If not, the price is pretty reasonable and I'll just live with it.
Sorry for posting non-C3D stuff here.

--shift studio.
I can't remember exactly how I did it, now that my version is registered. I think I went to Menu Bar > 1Password > License... and it gave me the options there. Did you try that yet?
 
I've been using 1Password since 2009 - but I didn't upgrade to v7 because I'm tired of being required to subscribe to software. Reading this gave me hope so I installed it. I can't find the permanent/perpetual work-around. Do you have any more hints? If not, the price is pretty reasonable and I'll just live with it.
Sorry for posting non-C3D stuff here.

--shift studio.
I wasnt aware you could still get a standaone licesence for 1Password, but according to the forms at least as of about May last year you can.
I shall be looking into to this myself as I object to paying for subscriptions to software, though I do sometimes have too :(
 
I wasnt aware you could still get a standaone licesence for 1Password, but according to the forms at least as of about May last year you can.
I shall be looking into to this myself as I object to paying for subscriptions to software, though I do sometimes have too :(
Yeah they don’t actively advertise and market the perpetual one, but I got it for both Mac and Windows in November of last year. So it was for sure available a few months ago. So I figure it should still be available now. I agree about the software subscriptions. The only one I pay that way is the Adobe one.
 
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