Do you have an idea for TiddlyWiki content that you think people might pay for?
Perhaps a technical manual? Or a guide for your city? Training materials for your company's field engineer force? Or maybe a manualisation of mental health intervention techniques? Would you be interested in working together to create your multimedia TiddlyWiki content and wrap it up as an app that can be distributed and sold on the iPhone/iPad app store? Here's the background for this invitation: I've recently finished my work with CTRLio. I'm very grateful to them for the support they've shown to my work on TiddlyWiki over the last 18 months. But now I need to find new sources of income to replace my salary. There's a few weeks in which I can consider some radical options, and this is one of them. I want to explore the idea of building a commercial TiddlyWiki ecosystem on top of the Apple platform of iOS, the Mac and iCloud. I'm not making any moral or philosophical judgement about Apple's place in the world. I'm considering this plan just because the App Store is one of the places that someone like me may be able to make money. This first step is simple: we create a framework for building iOS apps that provide a terrific, read-only user experience for interacting with TiddlyWiki documents. I'd want to support free or paid apps, with the possibility of using in-app purchases for premium content. It would be a way to deliver a highly custom, interactive user experience around multimedia content. We would be able to deliver free updates to the app and content via the app store update process. Such a simple application would be the quickest way to get into the app store - I believe in just a few weeks. The aim would be for the app to be invisible without much of a discernible user interface, just providing the mechanisms for the content to take centre stage. It certainly shouldn't resemble the familiar default TiddlyWiki editing interface. I'm open to suggestions about how to structure this from a business perspective. I'd need some upfront payment to fund the development, but hopfully we'd find a big enough handful of people that individual shares of the startup costs would be relatively small. If enough people can provide the necessary commercial backing we can use TiddlyPip to publish Eric's "Inside TiddlyWiki: The Missing Manual". Beyond simple read-only publishing, there would be a number of incremental improvements we could make once we see regular revenue: # Support read/write functionality like annotations, with iCloud syncing between iOS devices. # Support publishing custom, TiddlyWiki-based applications, such as tw5.scholars. It wouldn't appear to be a TiddlyWiki file: it would behave like a custom app for scholarly notetaking (including multi-device sync) # Support quizzes and questionnaires, with content unlocked by successfully completing exercises # Support reporting of progress to the TinCan API # Support one-on-one student/educator interactions through the app. Students might buy an academic textbook along with tokens to ask the author 5 questions via messaging within the app. # Create a full end-user application that enables the user to create and work with TiddlyWiki documents on iOS devices. This is really the ultimate goal from a development perspective. But it's a lot of work to create such an app with enough polish to stand out in the app store, and I'm not convinced there are enough people prepared to pay for apps like TiddlyWiki. But if we can bootstrap things via the content publishing route then we ought to be able to gain the time to make the app sufficiently polished and useful It's fun thinking about the possibilities. But we need to take this journey as a series of small steps, and I need to quickly find out if there's any hope of completing the first step. I need to know if there's anyone out there who might be prepared to put some money on the table based on their belief that they have content that could viably support this business model. So please let me know if you fit that description. Ideally, we'd find a handful of people which would make it easier to fund the initial development, until the app store revenues kick in. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions, Best wishes Jeremy -- Jeremy Ruston mailto:[email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
