With the recent enforcement of existing policies concerning nudity, etc. against grandfathered products...I had an idea: I have over the years crafted a "windows" only (using Borland's Delphi) multimedia design program that allows presentation style and more complex apps to be made with with it. I developed it for myself and programming is one of my hobbies just like Poser. The difference between it and everything else is the fact that it can generate small "stand-alone" packages that run anywhere without installation. IMHO is much more capable / portable than MS Powerpoint because it was designed to be. How this relates to R'osity (and Poser) is that merchants who would like their potential and existing customers to be able to see their product(s) in "all" their glory could do just that by offering a "downloadable demostration" from their website. I would not be offering any hosting. They would very easily create a virtual showcase for one or more of their products and distribution would be very simple while also incurring no distribution royalities (to me, at least). The software would never "install" anything on the end-user's PC but would simply run while providing more extensive visual details on the product. With all the multimedia making products available (especially Flash and other Flash creation software) is anyone who believes there would be a market here for such a product say at ~ $25 USD ? Thanks in advance for your time and input. All questions and "constructive criticisms" welcome. :)

the idea of an off site demo is a potential solution to the restrictions; however, I don't believe anyone would pay $25 to get that capability since some simple html coding could offer that (since it would be off site anyway).

HTML alone is fine for static (non-animated) imagery and very limited interactivity. Add to it other website technologies and you can increase the dynamic / interactive nature of the delivered content. Flash is great for this, but the software can be expensive and requires more skill than some may have (or have to time to learn). I was thinking that a low cost, easy to use program might be good here. If there's any software around the price point I mentioned before, I'd like to know. Surely, it would take longer to author a website than to use a simple program ? Depending on what software (free / paid) to use to craft the site, that could be expensive as well. How many have the skills required for the task ? As HTML alone likely would not be enough IMHO. Am I wrong ? The program would be a waste of everyone's time / money if it was used to merely display static / uninteractive showcases. Since it is a "multimedia" program, I would expect that multimedia apps would be built with it. Feel free to suggest a price that would be fair.

So, do the output of the program run in any web browser?

No, it doesn't. Currently, it only outputs in Windows EXE format.

While it would be outside my current skillset / experience to make it output to anything else, it's certainly not impossible.

Message edited on: 01/03/2006 14:26

Its a good idea but rosity policy is also that no nudity in main page links either, so merchants really cant add it anywhere, sad but true...

First of all, you'd have some competition: Mediachance's Multimedia Builder sounds similar, if (a bit) more expensive and more complex: http://mmb.mediachance.com/index.html. There are a number of tools out there that will do Flash animation. Almost none of them are as expensive or hard to use as Flash itself. Swish is one such program and their Swish Photo Album is arguably in the same category price-wise and feature wise. Also keep in mind that distributing EXE files is a bit of a no-no in the Internet world. It's considred a dangerous activity. And of course, EXEs will not be X-platform, whereas Flash will. (Which is probably OK, since we all know that nobody uses Poser on the MAC anymore ;-D) There are actually a lot of utilities out there that can generate stand-alone EXEs of pictures to create a slideshow. My favorite free picture viewer, IrfanView can do this, and a whole lot more. With the right feature set and a lot of heavily targetted marketing, you might make a dent in a market as small as the Poser community. But it's hardly a given. You might want to do some more research before investing a lot of your time in this idea. At the very least, you should compare the features of your app to the features of other apps (both freeware and shareware) that can accomplish the same goal.

Thanks for your points. They are most appreciated. Okay, so the policy extends beyond renderosity...too bad. I'd say "Multimedia Builder" is the closest match to what I have built myself. I have been aware of MMB for at least a year but never have had any desire to compete directly with this product or any similiar title. I agree about the need for the heavy marketing. However, I thought that perhaps it might fair better here in this niche crowd if it could fill a need. I lack the ability to do heavy marketing anyway. :( Interestingly, I purchased a licensed copy of SwishMax last year. So I am quite familiar with the "SwishZone". :) SwishMax is an excellent program, but it's not necessarily cheap. They discontinued / no longer sell their cheaper non "Max" swish versions which raises the bar for some folks. EXEs might have gotten a bad rep because of viruses, false positives and the like...but it hasn't really stopped people from using them to distribute / consuming downloadable software. Daz still uses them for most (if not all) it's products still, right ? People likely just consider the source and download based upon whether they trust the vendor or not if they're worried at all. I am also familiar with IrfanView. If a slideshow is truly sufficient for most people then that further decreases the numbers in the already existing minority group of people would might purchase the program. :) So far this confirms most of my research and suspicions which is that such a commerialization (even of an already developed and working program) for this purpose would probably not be fruitful or a wise use of time / resources. However, without actually throwing the question(s) out there, I wouldn't actually have ever known. The wondering could drive one mad. :)

DAZ does still use exe formats, but the general forum posting opinion seems to be heavily in preference for zips. The survey asks this question, so we'll see in about a month or so what the overall take is.

The DAZ .exe is a complete installer, which has plus and minus points. It's something distinct from an advertisement. It's good, and it's flexible enough that you can work around some problems, but it still has problems with the readme option at the end, if you don't have IE as default browser. I wonder how filesize compares with something like Macromedia Flash. An executable would allow you to put in some sort of nominal age-lock; does anything else? Also look at the MPEG-based VCD and SVCD formats. They allow slideshows, both good resolution still images and fancy image changes at lower resolution. I don't think there's a practical work-around for the nudity rules here, and not every merchant would want the hassle of creating a promotional "video", but the concept has some value.