I know this may seem obvious to most Silicon Valley people, but here in Belgium, it's really hard to find software engineers ready to get away from the usual jobs in big companies and into startups. Here are some of the reasons that make it worthwhile to me, in the hopes that some Belgian people are reading HN.
I'm sorry but the point still stands: excellent idea but the price gap is way too big with themeforest themes compared to the benefits. 50 bucks is the max I would set aside for this, and I consider it to be a lot.
I donno, Modulz looks well designed and built. I like the professional feel it provides. Hiring designer to build something similar would cost a lot more than 99 bucks. It's not that much to spend for someone who's serious about their startup and want something other than standard themeforst/bootstrap. (That is until everybody starts using this, I suppose by then there might be a lot more versions/tweaks).
Also, encryption is all about maths, so there are hundreds of ways to do just about anything, different parameters, different algorithms with different tradeoffs about speed, performance, resistance to attacks, data bandwidth, etc. etc.
So I don't think a library with the kind of interface you describe would be very useful. But I do think it would be great to have a library that allows us to configure encryption based on requirements instead of technicalities.
I've been using Parse with great pleasure as well for a couple of months and I really want to keep using it because their API is really beautiful and their design is absolutely gorgeous. But the past event that worries me is the acquisition of face.com. Right after the acquisition, they assured everyone it would stay up and they would continue to support it for all the developers who integrated its facial recognition API into their apps. And just a couple of months later, they announced they would fully absorb and kill it as an independent service. Today, the domain doesn't even lead anywhere. Now I know that the scope and impact of Face.com were way less than those of Parse, but still, you can't blame us for worrying.
One thing that would personally reassure me would be for Facebook to add a "non-hosted" offering to Parse, which means the ability to download Parse's application and install it on my own server. If this was available I would keep using Parse as a hosted service knowing that in the event that Facebook decides to shut it down at some point, I can export all my data and have it running on my own infrastructure.
When you have used the technology and seen with your own eyes the amount of time and effort it saves you when developing a mobile app, $85M really seems very cheap, especially when you compare it to how much they paid for an Instagram for example. Plus it should be mentioned that although their primary focus was on mobile platform, their SDK's also support Windows desktop, MacOSX, and traditional web dev. The potential is absolutely huge.
Your model is excellent. I love it. It's simple, it looks good, and contrary to what others said, you actually have a pretty innovative business model with the possibility to sell crowdsourced designs. But if I were you, I'd make it more interesting for graphics guys. The real innovation would be to do a 70-30 cut like for iPhone apps. If it worked economically, even if it merely covered your costs, it would attract much better designers and many more buyers that would also buy your own designs on which you could make more profit. You're solving a real problem here: geek decoration. Be more ambitious about it!
No but in some countries, architects can get sued if buildings they designed endanger lives or something like that. I think it's the case in Canada, isn't it? In some countries, engineering is a regulated profession in the same way as medicine or lawyers. Now should we consider software development as engineering, that's another story.
