Beginner Software Developer Hits Home Run with the Arrival of CoachStat
Baseball application developed using Real Studio streamlines statistics management for coaches on four continents; provides $10k/year supplemental income for beginner developers
Real Software, creator of cross-platform software development tools, today announced that CoachStat, a new baseball statistics management application for Macs, was developed using Real Studio by beginner programmers Les Kern and Steve Lutzow. The new application has already been used by more than 400 people on four continents, and produces $10,000 a year in supplemental income. Because of the application, baseball coaches who work on Macs can now access a full-featured baseball team management program that automates their team’s statistics and other tasks, without relying on their previously tedious and time-consuming manual processes.
For Les Kern and Steve Lutzow, CoachStat’s success is just the beginning. After realizing how easy it is to work with Real Studio, the duo are growing their business with several other applications due out in 2011.
The Background
When Les Kern, the Director of Technology for an Illinois school district, was tasked with finding a baseball stats program for his co-worker and school baseball coach to use on their school-issued Macs, he assumed there was something out there that would work. After an exhaustive search, he found the only offerings were for Windows. Rather than purchasing a PC he decided to develop a program on his own. With a demanding full time job, Les reached out to a friend, Steve Lutzow, to help with the project. Les had 20 years of IT management expertise, but he had no training or knowledge of any programming languages and had never built a software application before. He wanted a software development tool that was easy to use and had cross-platform capabilities, a full feature set and a strong development community.
The Real Solution
Les determined that Real Software’s Desktop Edition product was the best choice because of the following features:
- Cross-platform: Real Studio supports Windows, Mac and Linux with almost no extra effort. Unlike other cross-platform development tools, Real Studio creates a proper user interface for each platform using native controls for each platform.
- Easy to Use: Because Real Studio provides drag and drop interface building, people can get a lot of development without writing any code at all. With Real Studio, users can learn incrementally so they can start making progress on applications right away.
- Tutorials and Curriculum Guide: Real Studio includes hundreds of example projects to reference. And the Tutorial and QuickStart Guide walk users through creating real-world applications and familiarizing themselves with the Real Studio tools and commands.
- Rapid application development: Real Studio is a rapid application development environment that gives programmers the power to write, test and ship software four times faster than C++ or Java.
- Interface toolset: Real Studio allows for implementation of dynamic, on-the-fly menus and interface elements, which can change based on database queries, image formats and conditional checks.
- Migration: Users are free to sell the applications created with Real Studio or give them away for free without ever paying a fee to Real Software. For users coming to Real Studio from VB5, VB6 or .NET, Real Software offers a migration assistant to help transition their code.
Supporting Quotes – Les Kern, Technical Director, Illinois District 111
- "We saw an opportunity to provide a value for baseball coaches throughout the school district and around the world."
- "Real Studio is incredibly easy to use, yet has all the capabilities anyone could possibly want, and it was a joy to work with and create this."
- "After seeing what we could do with Real Software we decided quickly ‘Why not start a company and sell this online?’ Now I have so much pride saying I have a software company and we’re growing it with new applications in the works."
- "On average our coaches save hours of time and have a plethora of information they wouldn’t have otherwise."
Supporting Quotes – CoachStat Customers
- "Your software is working great for our team! We are now even sending our game summary report directly from CoachStat to the local paper after each game so they instantly have the stats for our games to report in the paper the next day - Awesome!" Pete B. - Crescent Valley Raiders High School varsity softball team - Corvallis, Oregon