On May 11, 2004, at 5:08 AM, Robert Covington wrote:

> So I was thinking about adding a splash timer , and also either 
> limiting the app to no more than 2 open images until registered, or 
> things like that.
>
If I were the author of Compositor, a minimum of a splash timer like 
Graphic Converter (that gets more annoying as time goes on) makes good 
sense. My  shareware uses a similar scheme to one you described, but 
I'm not particularly concerned about people hacking because it is a 
mini-PIM and doesn't compete for market share with the big boy apps. 
Compositor, however, directly competes with the big boys in its genre 
(i.e. photoshop etc.) at a drastically reduced price, and with almost 
identical features.  People looking at PS are bound to give your 
application a try, and (here's the key) it is definitely worth their 
time to try and break your registration scheme given the price 
difference between PS and Compositor. Simply put, they have some 
incentive to break in. So, something more restrictive than an annoying 
countdown might even be warranted. Maybe give them full features for xx 
amount of days and cripple the application gradually until you reach 
some number of elapsed days. Of course, implementing only the method 
used by GraphicConverter might be enough. If GC has been around this 
long, they must be coercing enough people to register to keep the 
financial ship floating(a few assumptions there to be sure)

Just my 2 cents. Apologize for the semi-ramble.

Brian




> I am not sure. Studies have shown that crippling an application, 
> smartly, can result in up to 5 times more registrations for shareware 
> products, simply because people really only pay for what they have to 
> (...as a group, that is. Individuals certainly vary).

I'd like to read your reference on this if you have it. Some hard 
evidence would help all of evaluate this difficult topic.