Mac:Need to hire a programmer.Preliminary questions

Hi there,

I am a Mac user and a professional photographer and have developed software
that I would like to sell to other photographers. It is mostly written in
Applescript. Here are several questions I need to clear up before I am
hiring:

Can a complex Applescript be converted to a regular non-script based
application?

Can this program be made to work on Windows PCs as well with not too much
effort?

How much effort would it be to develop a simple database application? It
should be a program that keeps track of clients names and addresses and
allows to print out contracts.

How much effort would it be to write a simple converting utility that
converts raw images to jpeg images?

Right now my workflow uses Photoshop to convert raw image files to jpeg
files and I use Filemaker pro to keep track of my clients. Obviously, I
cannot bundle these two applications with my program and that's why I am
thinking about having them written. Can anyone give me an idea of how
expensive this is and if it is at all practical? Based on the answers I am
also looking to hire a developer.

Thank you

Kurt

Narlen <m_narlen.RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Can a complex Applescript be converted to a regular non-script based
> application?

Yes. I do this on a daily basis at my job, although it is VBScript to
VB; but it is a similar process. As SM Ryan said, any lanugage will do.
A script reads from start to finish, and with VBScript, for example, you
can do subroutines. Any (modern) programming language can do that, quite
easily.

> Can this program be made to work on Windows PCs as well with not too much
> effort?

It depends on what language you decide to convert your script into. If
you do it in Java, then yes, it is easy. If you do it in C, provided you
don't mind a recompile, it is also easy (provided you either stick to
ANSI C, or use libraries that are available on both platforms). You can
do all this in Qt (www.trolltech.com), which is what I've done before,
which contains all the libaries you need. All I needed to do was
recompile, and my application worked on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows.

> How much effort would it be to develop a simple database application? It
> should be a program that keeps track of clients names and addresses and
> allows to print out contracts.

It depends on what you want. If you want to utilize a backend server,
even one running on a local machine, it isn't hard. MySQL comes to
mind. If you want to code from scratch, it gets difficult. Do you
*need* a *database*? Or is it just some way of storing information?
There are other technologies available. AFAIK applications such as
iTunes use XML for *everything*, but the way the data is structured it
certainly seems like a database.

> How much effort would it be to write a simple converting utility that
> converts raw images to jpeg images?

There are libaries in C to do this already, freely available to the
public.

> Right now my workflow uses Photoshop to convert raw image files to jpeg
> files and I use Filemaker pro to keep track of my clients. Obviously, I
> cannot bundle these two applications with my program and that's why I am
> thinking about having them written. Can anyone give me an idea of how
> expensive this is and if it is at all practical? Based on the answers I am
> also looking to hire a developer.

Then hire me. :) I was a professional photographer, but I quit to go
into something more stable: software development.

One caveat to all this of course, is the licensing of the "software".
There are dozens of routines to do what you need, but many of them are
under GPL'ish licenses which have their own quirks to worry about. If
you use, MySQL, for example, you'll have to be sure to research how and
if you can package it with your application. Or, if the user will have
to download and install it themselves, etc.

If you use a framework such as Qt, or a language such as Java, you are
pretty much guaranteed to have portability, with little effort.

-p