Dashboard Widget developers WANTED

[Fredstar]

Hey guys,
Basically here is the deal, i love Macs and widget development has hardly taken off, i want to stimulate it with some financial incentive for you developers who have ADC membership so we can all take full use of Dashboard. I am after developers who can make quality and useful widgets - there is a fair bit of money involved.
So, i am going to be selling a bunch of widgets for a v reasonable $10 or £6. I am going to be offering a healthy margin, of about 20-30% of the profits you guys will be getting out of it (depending on the amount of widgets you produce).
Ok so what i am offering you guys:
-An intial 'signing on' amount to you guys after you develop the first few widgets for me - not sure how much it will be but it will be a fair amount

-20-30% of the profits depending on the number of the total widgets i sell, for example i am thinking of offering 20 high quality widgets for the fixed amount above and sell 1000 at £6, that is £6000.
If you have developed 5 of those 20 widgets, that works out as £300 per widget (£1200 for developing 5), which gives you 20% of £1200 which is £240 - that is just if i get 1000 people.
Now i am forecasting sales of near 50,000 as i have a lot of people interested, but we need to move quickly in order to catch a market.

So what you guys think?

Off the top of my head, widgets that can be localized - ie Yellow pages for each EU country, Ebay for each country and loads more, much more web cams across the world. The key is these widgets have to be graphically pleasing and of course useful and widgets people are actually going to use.
Freddie

[Steven]

I think it's a fine idea, I just wish I could go get 10.4 to play with the Dashboard already ;)

[hawkmoon]

I looked at the developing for Dashboard stuff on developer.apple.com last night. Doesn't look too bad. I think I'm going to assemble a 'quick query ofr postgresql' widget that'll let you exec a quick and dirty sql query, and see the results.

[njyo]

Sounds good to me, gotta see, if I find some time and get a copy of Tiger then I'd be with you.... As a computer science student it is always good to find some other CS-related money sources. :)

So if I get something working, I'll contact you.
_W

[Burden]

I'm probably talking into the void here, but...

If you have developed 5 of those 20 widgets, that works out as £300 per widget (£1200 for developing 5), which gives you 20% of £1200 which is £240

o_O

What?

Wierd math aside, and no offense intended, but what value does Fredstar bring to the table? Why does he get 80% of the gross on products he didn't develop?

Why wouldn't a developer just inline a paypal button on the back-panel and bypass your scheme altogether? Or take the high, easy road and give his widgets away like nearly everyone else will be doing? Unless you're selling boxed SKUs at Apple Stores or something, I can't imagine why anyone would accept what you're proposing.

i am forecasting sales of near 50,000

Heh. You might want to talk to the Mac shareware developers around here; they'd probably be glad to hook you up with some reasonable expectations.

At any rate, I am forecasting 50,000 nearly-identical versions of every worthwhile widget made, and nearly as many clones of the worthless ones -- especially since the functional bits of most widgets are trivially copied, and built out of standardized, well-understood parts anyway. Widget choice will be an embarassment of riches. And, mostly, free riches.

The only marginally-marketable widgets will rely on tiny, specialized markets (ones I can't, frankly, even imagine at the moment). You're dreaming.

Happy Tiger Day, BTW. :)

[Wevah]

My response is going to be the same one you received over at the MacNN Developer forum:

No.

[nevermore]

i would be very very carefully with widgets developing right now.

look at the insecurity of dashboard at the curret tiger build.

they will have to change many main functions.

so right now its not sure, whether a widget you are developing today, runs at further tiger builds.

for example:
when they cancel the system request options, to handle this footballfield-wide-open-backdoor, many widgets could not be realised anymore. and trust me. apple need to cancel one of dashboards main functions to make it save.

i also made some widgets. but no commercial-widget. so iam not so angry when my widgets would not run anymore.

to make really usefull widgets its better to wait until the secure of dashboard is fixed.

[OneSadCookie]

There's nothing major wrong with dashboard's security. All they have to do is add a confirmation to dashboard "You are about to launch this widget for the first time, are you sure" like they already have for applications (and preferably turn off auto-installation via Safari, or perhaps put the confirmation dialog for the installation rather than first launch), and the problem's gone. Even that alert need only appear of the widget contains native code; "pure" HTML+JavaScript widgets pose no threat.

So, quit spreading the FUD. Dashboard's power isn't going to be reduced.