Serif are massive. If you’re on Windows, you may have heard of them. When I told my father in law about Affinity Designer when it was in Beta, he said that Serif are a really good company to deal with, and the produce a lot of Windows based resources and software. Considering he’s on Microsoft everything the rest of the time, this seemed like a good recommendation to consider the Affinity software more seriously.
Glad I did.
Knowing how Softpress ticks internally (ex employee, also dealt with them on a freelance basis for a long time too), I’d say that a year long beta would not be something they would consider. Mostly because Softpress is much smaller, it’s certainly far smaller now than it was, and to grow and survive, it’ll need your money sooner rather than later.
They have done public betas in the past, but those have been very short - a month at the most IIRC. So the possibility of some kind of public “hands on” beta period is possible given past behaviour, but certainly not anything that should be expected.
You will recall their their demo times has always been quite generous - usually a month, and that is more than enough time to get the feel for the software and getting something decent out of it.
On 22 Oct 2018, 8:40 am, grantsymon wrote:
A suggestion for FW8.
I think it would be very smart for Softpress to adopt the Affinity (Serif) model for FW8. Serif have run up to year long betas for their new apps (e.g. Affinity Photo). The betas are free for anyone to download and use and will continue to work up until a new one is produced, or the final shipping version is available. IOW, they’re time limited.
This has worked really well for them. People happily tried them out, because they were free. They were able to contribute to the development with feature requests, suggestions and bug reports and when they finally shipped, they continued in much the same manner and their forums are extremely active. The pricing model was also very effective versus Adobe’s software, as they understood the market and its gigantic size and potential. In my view, the same holds true for web software.
So I would love to see FW8 released as free beta software 6 months to a year prior to final shipping, with perhaps an update to Walter’s forum software, to facilitate the feedback aspects of beta/bug reports/feedback/suggestions. I think this would really build momentum prior to release.
(I have in my head a thought for Dave and his generosity, as I haven’t really posted here for a long time)
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