Resco Explorer 2009 Released

No. You're on your own, Gek.

Each year seems to be a "paid" upgrade. Wonder how crazy it is this time for so few changes...

Paying my annual PDA update tax to Palm since 1997.

Yes, well $15 is better and probably should be the regular retail price. You can thank the Apple Store because these days people expect to pay .99 - 4.99 for a mobile application. I like RE as much as anyone, but $30 is robbery for a PDA/Smartphone application. Your talking about a piece of code that's downloaded off the Internet. It doesn't take too long to make what you actually put into an application. If the application is worth it's salt, then it will make money. Before you start talking about how difficult it is to make an application.. well, spare me. It's only as difficult as your knowledge. As for upgrade cost, that is the real joke. Unless it's an all redo of coding then it's really pathetic to charge even half price for an upgrade.

The last known classic PDA user.

Apple developers are MUCH more realistic than the Palm ones have been, and from the sales figures it appears that some developers of these sub $5 apps are doing very well. The "Palm Economy" has been built on charging an average of $15-30 for applications, even simple utilities like font managers and calculator hacks. Minor "upgrades" have been priced as though they completely recoded the things - when in reality the developer made the app compatible with the latest Treo model - something they're going to do anyway if they want to keep selling... On top of that, the distribution network of selling through a variety of middlemen took a big chunk of the developer's proceeds - and some middlemen never passed along the sales price to the developers...

I've been rallying against the ridiculous churning of "upgrade" fees by Palm developers - if I paid you $20 bucks for your cute game, why on earth don't you just GIVE me the latest version if you are already coding it, instead of trying to get another $10-15 out of me to make it work on the "new" Treo that Sprint gave me because the old one is EOL?? It costs you nothing, and I'm getting smarter and will more often than not just delete your dumb game and do without instead of encouraging "upgrade" churn by sending you a payment.

I own a key to Resco Explorer. Bought it about a year and a half ago. The 2008 version was a "free" upgrade because it was within a few months of when I bought it. But if I were to pay this additional $15 for code they're doing anyway to increase sales to new customers, that's ***$45.00** (FORTY FIVE DOLLARS) within a couple years just to have use of this utility. Absolutely ridiculous. I mostly use the app for accessing zip files (I find the free "FileProg" best for most OS file manipulations), and it'd be great to have access to the expanded archives, but I'll live without the extra functions - as they're not life changing.

It would cost Resco the bandwidth of a few kilobytes to just offer free upgrades to paid customers, the customers would praise them up and down for the value received from a THIRTY DOLLAR investment in the program. But instead, I'll live with the now diminished older version because it suits my needs, and if my next Treo isn't supported by the 2007 version I'll toss the $30 key and buy something else that unzips from a developer that charges enough up front to cover whatever bandwidth deemed necessary to offer the program updates for life.

Ranosoft is one developer that does it right - charges a fair but affordable price up front for his utilities - and guarantees in writing that you will have access to whatever latest code he writes.

I'd rather have 400,000 sales of a net $2.00 than 5,000 sales of a net $20.00. The "upgrade churners" discount the value of viral marketing - I've owned an iPod touch about a month and have nearly shared more info about apps on that device with people than I have in 12 years using Palm apps.

Developers: once your code is ready - wouldn't you rather have more and more people using it instead of working on mortgaging their house to afford their "initial" license and then the annual "upgrades"?


Paying my annual PDA update tax to Palm since 1997.