Flash, Chrome and FireCalc

[ERD50]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MuirWannabe ... Also, please build walls around the current Firecalc code, so that the original always exists. Or at least until a new version overwhelms it in terms of confidence. Thanks for your consideration.

+1 on keeping the current version intact until there is confidence in any new version.

As far as testing to gain confidence, here's a suggestion: Allow the option of accepting inputs from a plain text/csv file. This would let testers create a suite of standard inputs (or ad hoc as desired), and easily run them to test the output against an expected result. And if the output could be dumped to a text/csv file, an entire suite of tests could be automatically validated. That's a heck of a lot easier and error free than typing stuff into fields on a web page. And easy to share compared to saving a bunch of profiles/cases under a user name.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andy R .... As for frugal cheap folks, we can try to find the right balance. It's really hard to build a sustainable project when free.

Absolutely. And if you were to tell us you just can't support this, because there just is no money in it for you, I'd respect this. It's a business, not a charity.

I do hope you can find ways to profit from it. I know next to nothing about making money from services like this, so I have nothing to offer there. But even a cheapskate like me would be willing to pay something ($10/year is a nice round, picked out of the air number) for something above a very basic set of features. I think if you limit a 'pro' version to only very advanced features, the audience would also be very small. Maybe you'd need to go very advanced, and attract financial planners/pros - a much smaller audience, but maybe willing to pay much bigger bucks? But again, I know nothing in this area.

What about an open source approach? Again, I have no idea how these are managed, but there seem to be a lot of interested coders out there, and I've learned that there are some free libraries out there that seem to be easy to use that provide some very fancy and useful graphing options.

-ERD50

[Andy R]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ERD50 What about an open source approach? Again, I have no idea how these are managed, but there seem to be a lot of interested coders out there, and I've learned that there are some free libraries out there that seem to be easy to use that provide some very fancy and useful graphing options.

We would likely build it using lots of open source tools but probably not likely to open source the code itself for a few reasons.

1) It would likely undermine a Pro service as people could just setup and offer it for free.

2) Being open source means everyone can see your code including any potential exploits. Of course, this is a good thing if you have an active development community. Building such community is pretty tough and most projects get abandoned.