Comment by swies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swies | Hacker News Reader

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First I want to say thanks! We love your work at PortableApps.com and send people there whenever they ask us to add portable software.

Our value is keeping the catalog up-to-date and putting a nice interface around the updating process. Not ad-blocking.

We actively uncheck toolbars for maybe 5 apps. If those apps removed their toolbar offers people would still use Ninite to track updates and automate work.

On profits XOR good: We do make money, but we also work really hard to do good as in http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html

Our website is completely free (and ad-free) for home users. We save people from about 15 minutes of mindless installer work every second.

Our $9.99 home Updater product is just something to point home users at when they ask to donate to us. We're a company. We don't take donations.

We also run http://ninite.com/accessible to help visually-impaired people manage software. Actually, until last summer that was about the only way for people to install Flash with a screenreader http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility/2012/07/flash-player-in...

If publishers want to make updating their software artificially hard there's not a lot we can do except trust that people will see what's going on and move to other products.

Ninite is fantastic. There simply should not be any naysayers - the naysayers cannot provide the experience Ninite provides.

Ninite's ability to group many products into a singular downloadable installer is heaven. Keep up the awesome work.

Not being able to choose where things get installed killed Ninite for me. Their reasoning is "where an app is installed is an implementation detail that users shouldn't worry about." My SSD can only hold so much, and I don't see the benefit of having a browser or file sharing app on an SSD. That seems like a detail I should care about.

I usually install to the default location.. shutdown the app if running, move the directory, and symlink/mklink the default location to the new location.

This is especially helpful for games/apps you are actively using (on the SSD) but when you're done, or not playing as much, it's still available, just not as fast.

I believe it uses the default Program Files and (x86) directory. Have you tried setting that to your other drive so your Ninite-installed apps default to their, but you can still manually select your SSD for the apps you wish to run more quickly (PhotoShop, etc).

Howdy Patrick. First, let me say thanks as well, as I like your product and have sent people your way when they ask about something like PortableApps.com for local software. I'd also like to make clear that I in no way have a problem with the way Ninite works. I just had a problem with the way this article was written. Looking back at my original post, I definitely wrote a few things incorrectly and I apologize for that.

Regarding profits XOR good, I agree that you can do both and hope it didn't seem like I was implying otherwise. PortableApps.com, though fully open source, is also a for-profit venture that also intends to do good. It just happens to not be turning a profit yet. We're working on a freemium model as well, but we decided against making our updater and app store a paid feature and against bundling in ads as it would negatively impact some of our users.

I was unaware that Adobe had accessibility issues but, considering the interface, it makes sense. So, let me commend you on assisting with that. We did some custom work to ensure accessibility in our products as we have a large contingent of folks it helps as well.

Regarding publishers making updating their software artificially hard, I'm with you on that. We've had more than one publisher refuse to appear in the PortableApps.com App Store and Updater for that very reason: they want to have users to visit their website on each new version to see offers. That's why the portable version of the app that's not on Ninite isn't available on PortableApps.com either, despite offering up possible alternative revenue streams and offering capabilities. So, we're in the same boat there.

We should have a chat sometime and see if there are any ways we could work together.

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