I am fascinated by hardware with poor software support so I built two highly unsuccessful native mac apps: MASS and LabelScope to work with weight scales and label printers. You can read their defunct websites at https://semireg.com/mass/ and https://semireg.com/labelscope/
Both worked in novel ways. MASS “floated” the current weight above all apps and when double-clicked would insert the current weight at the focused cursor point via keyboard accessibility APIs.
LabelScope printed to label printers but wasn’t a design app or a driver. Instead, like MASS it floated above other apps as a “scope” which would real-time capture and dither the image inside the virtual label. Double-click would send the dithered image directly to the printer using the printer’s native commands via USB (no driver).
Fast forward a few years and I started on ANOTHER label printer app based on Electron. I’m happy to report it’s a healthy business and growing! Learn more at https://label.live
Can you please please PLEASE support Brady printers? They're specialised label printers used in the laboratories. The software they use called LabelMark is no longer supported except lots of labs still have label stocks. So they're stuck used the pos software. To make matters worse its not supported on win10.
I'm happy to be your lab rat and customer for life because we are never going to stop using the printers. I've completed the survey on your site. Shoot me an email if you want any more details.
Yes, it’s ramen profitable, bootstrapped and growing. It’s just me at the moment and I’m still juggling full-time mobile app and IOT consulting. Since Label LIVE is a React app wrapped in Electron I’ve given a lot of thought to bringing it into a proper SaaS via browser but just don’t have the time.
Yes, it’s a big challenge. There are three solutions I see:
1) Rely on PDF and browser print APIs, which means you give up direct USB access and even some paper size API which is kind of a deal breaker for thermal printers.
2) Rely on a browser extension of some sort. This might work, and I haven’t researched this much, because I find it clunky and error prone, bad UX and at mercy of browsers.
3) Use the existing app as an “agent” that receives “print jobs” from the cloud. This would be similar to ShipStation Connect and Google Cloud Print. This has potential but would need all sorts of engineering and UX to become seamless.
Oh, definitely due to a small market WITHIN a small market. When users acquire speciality business hardware they don't reach for macOS. I'm trying to change that... one device at a time. MASS and LabelScope were mostly proof of concept. They failed in the sense that they were the cost of the education to do better. With Label LIVE (my newest app), I built an actual design app, targeting a much broader market (cross-platform to boot).
I was thinking about building the same kind of native Mac app as MASS and I never heard of it... my bad. Did you have prior USB programming experience? How did you learn to interface with the scales? Did you reverse engineer them? What’s the best way to learn to do this sort of USB programming on the Mac? Thanks in advance for your answers.
TLDR: Small wins over the course of months and months of trial and error.
I never considered myself a hardware integrator until I accidentally became one. Oops, e.g. fake it until you make it. Looking back at college, I received barely passing grades in my C and assembly coursework. Sure, I "understand" bitwise operations and bit shifting and LSB/MSB... but it still feels foreign to me, like every time I got something to work I celebrated that I made any progress at all. Me the imposter.
There were times in developing all these apps that I seriously thought, "well, I'm stuck, this is the end" and I just kept working a few hours at a time... If anything, troubleshooting and not getting fatally-frustrated is my super-power. These hard-won-solved-problems led me to build something "simple" for the user, which is its own very special reward (aka dev dopamine and serotonin).
I loved building these apps. I never thought I'd make any money. And my relative success with Label LIVE is just a rewarding icing on the cake of enjoying this kind of puzzle-solving. I mean, native Node modules, WASM... are their own special kinds of hell. The kind of hell you forget quickly and you have better written your future self decent documentation. Makes me nervous just thinking about finally adding Apple Silicon support. hands sweat
Both worked in novel ways. MASS “floated” the current weight above all apps and when double-clicked would insert the current weight at the focused cursor point via keyboard accessibility APIs.
LabelScope printed to label printers but wasn’t a design app or a driver. Instead, like MASS it floated above other apps as a “scope” which would real-time capture and dither the image inside the virtual label. Double-click would send the dithered image directly to the printer using the printer’s native commands via USB (no driver).
Fast forward a few years and I started on ANOTHER label printer app based on Electron. I’m happy to report it’s a healthy business and growing! Learn more at https://label.live