Thoughts on my PDF mail merge desktop app?
I got interested in building desktop apps using Electron for a while now. I've built multiple apps that do some specific work since then. Today I got some money from one of those apps. And it's open-source!
About the app: It's a PDF mail merger, in which you will input an Excel file and a PDF form, and then it will generate multiple PDFs for you based on rows in the Excel file. Just like when you want to send out PDF invitations for multiple people with customized names and addresses. A user used my app to fill out SBA Form 641 from an Excel file, for example.
This is the app source code: https://github.com/plainlab/plainmerge
Looks good!
Question for you - I’ve never built anything open source so I’m curious - are you concerned that people will just download the source code inside of buying the app? Or worse that someone might copy/steal your code for their own app?
I believe in open source and fair play so I guess I’m fine with both of your concerns then ;)
I'd love to talk privately about this. I have a simple online product that dovetails nicely with this, and solves one of the biggest points of feedback we got from users.
DM me on Twitter at @NickFreiling?
I can't DM you, DM me at @manhtai_ then
Sure!
Nice. Are there commercial apps that do something similar? I've never heard of a PDF mailmerge before.
I've tried to Google around but found mostly web apps. The problem with web apps is you have to send your data to other's servers, some like me won't want that, so I built an offline desktop app :D
It's definitely an interesting app! I'd post it to the /r/sideproject reddit, I got a lot of interest from there when I first built Beekeeper Studio.
Question for me - What would I be doing if I needed such a tool? Might be worth adding use cases or links to templates to the readme?
Also I think it would really benefit from a quick video walking through how it works.
Good luck! I love Electron, so happy to see others experiment with it.
Thanks! I will add more details to the readme or even make a Youtube video for it :D