Established as a brand in 2017, Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft has now seen its fifth full year as an outlet for my free software.
Let's recap the year, and speculate a bit about what might happen in 2023.
As before, Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft continued as a non-profit, with a direct operating cost in 2022 of about 15 euros.
By my estimation, the only product in Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft's software lineup with a potential to generate money remains VCS, with a predicted average income of 5–20 euros per month for the first year and less after that – depending on the pricing strategy. But given additional costs in commercializing it, I don't find it worth pursuing at this time.
About 14 of Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft's software applications saw development in 2022. A near-complete list can be found on Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft's website using the #2022 tag.
VCS remained by far the most popular of Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft's software. This well-featured control application for Datapath's VisionRGB video capture hardware was preferred by many over the hardware's bundled software for its improved ability to handle dynamic analog signals along a host of other feature improvements designed to enable highest-quality capture.
VCS was trailed in popularity by the retro n-gon renderer, PCbi, and the DOS C compiler benchmark, each of which saw a level of interest above the baseline.
The decision by Heroku to end its free tier in 2022 had some impact on Tarpeeksi Hyvae Soft – namely, motivating the discontinuation as SaaS of Lintulista and Rally-Sport Content, which had relied on this tier and had been falling out of use.
The discontinued web version of Lintulista was replaced with an Electron-powered desktop version.
As in 2021, the year saw the introduction of three new projects: hs, paletted <canvas>, and Rally-Sport corruptor.
Peering into 2023, PCbi is scheduled for a requested open-source re-release, w95 aims to be a front-end framework for building in-canvas Windows 95-like web apps, and an offshoot of Serlain using the w95 framework might be on the table.
GitHub user @AkBKukU contributed code to the VCS repository, and several others contributed to that repository in issue reports.