Metafile Companion – A Good Value for Your Company
Could you build it for less?
How much would it cost your company to develop a product like Metafile Companion?
Here’s a few questions (and answers) that might help guide your
calculations…
Basic development costs.
- How long a development project is this for a senior programmer with 15 years of
graphics programming experience?About a year.
- How much source code is there to write?
Metafile Companion consists of approximately 50,000 lines of code in 165 files.
- How much would a senior programmer cost for this project?
About $100K (not including company overhead). - How much do the current development tools cost?
About $1500.
- How much does a Windows development system cost?
About $3000.
The bottom line.
- The above numbers don’t even begin to address the costs of training, developing
user documentation, testing and your own company overhead for the developers. - To build Metafile Companion yourself could easily cost your company $100K and one
year of time. Or you could license it from Companion Software today at
a fraction of the cost.
Are you ready to handle these issues?
If you are thinking of building your own product, there may be a few things that
you haven’t planned for. For example…
Development issues.
- OLE is tough enough to implement. Do you know how to work around the MFC class library
bug that causes OLE in-place servers not to zoom in and out properly? - The Windows Help file viewer is much richer than before. Do you know the difference
between “contextual”, “procedural” and “What’s This?” help? - Windows programs must have an uninstall capability. Do you know that just using
Help for a program may cause its uninstall to “fail”? How do you avoid this? - Registering with the operating system is more important than ever. Do you know what
the “PrintTo” and “ShellNew” keys are for? - Do you know how to respond to the new WM_CONTEXTMENU message?
- Have you read Microsoft’s The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design
from cover to cover? If not, you’ll probably miss a few key items that Metafile
Companion takes care of.
Already have a similar product?
Even if you are developing or porting a similar product, purchasing the Metafile
Companion source code is a good idea.
Been there, done that.
- There is a lot to be said for being able to look at the internals of an industrial-strength,
shipping product. - Find answers to all the questions posed in the “ARE YOU READY TO HANDLE THESE ISSUES?”
section of this brochure!
Haven’t done that yet!
- Perhaps there are features in Metafile Companion that you haven’t gotten around
to yet. You can “inherit” them from Metafile Companion. - Do you need multi-level undo and redo capability? We’ve got it.
- Would you like a WYSIWYG polygon editor? We’ve got one.
How did they do that?
- Are there things that Metafile Companion seems to do better than your product? Learn
all the secrets. - Discover how Metafile Companion redraws the screen without flicker.
- Find out how to do quick, “perfect” hit-testing on actual objects, not just bounding
boxes or outlines.
Will your company make more sales?
Perhaps more than anything, the true bottom line is “Will licensing Metafile Companion
help your sales?”
A promotional item.
- Could you use a little something extra to boost the sales of your main product?
- How about throwing in Metafile Companion for “free” when customers purchase your
main products?
New life to old products.
- Are you shipping with an older drawing program that is obviously out-of-date?
- Rather than trying to transform the old program, why not start selling a “state
of the art” program instantly!
A strong suite component.
- Would you like to assemble a suite of products but don’t have enough applications
yet? Add Metafile Companion to the suite!
Pays for itself.
- You can easily cost-justify licensing Metafile Companion. Consider what you already
spend on sales and marketing every month. Then estimate the increase in revenue
if you use Metafile Companion to boost sales of your other products. Metafile Companion
can pay for itself in a matter of months!