That’s an admittedly bad experience. Luckily most small developers have less annoying schemes.
The one I most enjoyed was for Transmit –ironically also an FTP application –who just send you an e-mail with a clickable link with the registration info. You click it and voil the app is registered. Not even copy and paste required.
The worst of activation is in the world of music creation software. Almost everything comes with a dongle or activation. And the worst of the worst are these donkeys: http://www.ikmultimedia.com. They actually limit of license keys you can generate. Each one is bound to hardware, and users are most likely to install the apps on several machines (desktops, laptops, etc - all legal).
Don’t people realize that copy protection punishes the people who pay? Pirates just hack around it. Us law-abiding folk are the ones who bump head-on into the hurdles.
its a shame that some programs are so convoluted to pay for… you might even begin to think that they don’t want your money!
still it seems to be the thing to make things needlessly complicated. there is a nice comment above about total commander: “Just copy the c:\totalcmd folder and you’re good to go.” which reminds me of the pointless complexity of windows registry and the DLL hell “problem”… it seems the ‘correct’ way to do things is almost always more complicated than it needs to be. there was a blog post about microwaves a little while ago to the same effect…
i think its all part of the same problem. not enough time/effort is spent on keeping things simple. i myself am guilty of making things pointlessly complicated, and its an easy enough trap to fall into… 
Ugh, smartftp, where the theme is more important than the program.
Churchill GAA is a Gaelic Athletic Association club based outside Tralee in County Kerry, Ireland.They play in
Division 5 of the county league and in the Novice Championship. The club’s most famous player is former Irish
Republican Army member and Kerry U-21 player Martin Ferris…
For the record, I reached my activation limit on my copy of XP just had to call their support number to get my activation life cycle (or whatever you want to call it) reset, no questions asked. Seems like if you’re willing to jump through their hoop they don’t really limit your activations.
This of course doesn’t mean they can’t one day decide to stop supporting it altogether, but I was surprised at how easy it was to get up and running after ‘violating’ the license agreement more or less.
“Try Transmit on the Mac. $30, period. For every computer you ever own. Forever. Period. Easy registration process. Oh, and it has every feature I’ve ever heard of in an FTP client.”
Except the ability to throttle downloads and uploads :S (which Total comander for Windows has)
Why no FTP client does that on the Mac? There are no ftp clients that are able to do what wget does with a single parameter.
I’ve tried: Transmit, Fetch, Flow, Finder itself, Interarchy, CaptainFTP, Cyberduck… at that point I had to stop but I might be missing someone.
Regarding the topic @ hand, the best registration is no registration at all That, or you store all your numbers in apps like Yojimbo, Wallet, etc. On the Mac there are funny methods, I remember once I had to literally drag a license from the browser to the program. Can’t remember what it was.
“I actually liked the one from 1Password. You get an email with a licence-image and just drag-and-drop the image from the email to the application.”
Yeah, that was it was funny dragging that stuff.
On the Mac some other programs offer “one click” and the app opens registered.
A Dell Precision business workstation vs whatever you had at the Mac store …
I’m not sure I’d use that as your regular consumer price comparison.
XPS 420:
Intel Core™2 Q6700 Quad-Core (8MB L2 cache,2.66Hz,1066FSB)
4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 4 DIMMs
500GB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache
Blu-ray Disc Combo (DVD+/-RW + BD-ROM)
24 inch E248WFP Entry Widescreen Digital Flat Panel Monitor
ATI Radeon HD3870 512MB GDDR4
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Dell AS501PA 10W Flat Panel Attached Spkrs for Analog Flat Panels
Hauppauge HVR1250 Hybrid TV Tuner and Remote
Dell USB Enhanced Multimedia Keyboard
Dell Premium Optical USB Mouse
Dell 19 in 1 Media Reader with Bluetooth
Dell Media Card Reader included in Dell Bluetooth Package
– $1899 –
Get a linux server, then use SCP or SFTP,
as opposed to FTP, which is a horrible and insecure (login + password transferred in plain text) protocol.
Jeff,
I’d be interested to hear exactly what it is that’s stopping you from continuing to use EditPad Pro. I fully agree with the sentiment in your article. Paying customers should be treated with respect. The payment and registration process should be as painless as possible.
I believe that for our products (which includes EditPad Pro and RegexBuddy which you own), we’ve done a good job at that. But I’m still interested in hearing any ideas you may have for improvement.
When you purchased EditPad Pro, it was a three-step process:
No need to juggle with any registration keys or whatever. Your details are embedded in the setup.exe You can repeat step 3 at any time, on any computer, as long as you keep the download. You can continue using EditPad Pro (at least the version you downloaded) as long as you have a computer that can run Win32 executables, even if Just Great Software went out of business.
If you don’t keep the download, or want to download the latest free update, head over to http://www.editpadpro.com/download.html and enter your email address and (short) user ID. If you don’t have your ID, enter your email address only and your ID will be emailed to you instantly. If your email address changed (we seem to have a gmail acount on file for your EditPad Pro license), contact support@editpadpro.com to have it changed.
Getting a new download is the only time you need to identify yourself as a paying customer. The download then again has your license information embedded into it and you can reinstall it any time in the future.
@Scott McPherson: “Although you can still install Office97, if you try to open a document created with Office97 with Office 2007 or Office 2003 with the 2007 Compatibility pack, you will no longer be permitted to open the document.”
this is off-topic, but this False. It’s documents BEFORE Office 97 that have been made obsolete, for security reasons (buffer overwrites, macros, etc). It’s Word 2.0 from 1994! http://support.microsoft.com/kb/938810/en-us
btw, we’re in 2008. If you’re still using those important documents from Office 95 or DOS, why don’t you just save them the heck back to disk!
Mike B, that story may have be a lie by the developer. Sounds too generous to me, the untrusting person I am. Also, yes, product registration is way too difficult, I’ve been paid to help people even just register software in the past, which is insane.
lovely idea!
thank you for reminding me. i just donated $25 to Spybot-Search and Destroy. they have kept my computer safe and clean. They deserve it
Steve: Shell ftp isn’t a nice interface. That’s what Jeff’s paying for.
(And, um, Visual Studio Express is Ifree/i, by the way. As is SQL Express. MS Iwants you/I to use their tools even if you don’t want to pay, because they Iwant/i developers. Much like Apple gives a copy of their development tools away with Ievery copy of OSX/i.)
Jeff: To clarify, to me it sure looks like that “one year” thing is not the Iregistration/i, but the Isupport contract/i.
Kenw: Try the reverse. Try picking ia Mac/i, and price an identical-spec Dell or close-as-you-can-get (or your preferred manufacturer).
Every time I’ve done that, I’ve never been able to beat the Mac by more than about $50, and more often the Mac’s same or cheaper - and better designed. The XPS One can’t beat the iMac, last I checked. Nor can the workstation models beat the Mac Pro, except at the bare-minimum spec, and then not by much.
(And that also assumes a zero-value proposition to the mouse and keyboard choices [outside of the Mini or laptops]; as someone who uses an Apple Keyboard Ion Windows at work/i because it’s Iso much better/i than a generic PC keyboard, that’s not really an acceptable assumption. Add $3-50 worth of keyboard to your PC prices, if you agree.)
Full Disclosure: I build my own PCs, like my home machine running Vista x64. I’ve used Windows since before 3.0, linux since the 1.2 kernels, and Macs since System 6, and use all three every day. I’m not a platform bigot - in Iany/i direction.
I think Microsoft might of solved your registration problem.
Live Mesh
http://blogs.msdn.com/livemesh/archive/2008/04/21/live-mesh-as-a-platform.aspx
Its pretty much the registery in the cloud + data synchronization.
Reading more about this Live Mesh and I think Microsoft just built the OS in the cloud.
Sorry if this is getting off topic. 
the whole windows vs linux argument is moot… most good free and open software is availible to windows developers anyway.
I personally treat windows like an obscure verson of linux with a quirky comamnd line. Most things are installed on it easily enough. I even have a batch file that redirects “ls” in to “dir”.
Plus I get my games.
LINUX!
I’ve found this to be a major problem too. It’s actually the hassle of the registration that I find more deterring than the product price itself. Serial numbers that come with boxed software are bad enough - trying to track serial numbers for software purchased online is a nightmare.
This isn’t going to change anytime soon, so the best we can do as consumers is have a system for organizing. I’ve recently adopted KeyPass (a very nice password storage program) for my passwords. Your post has made me realize that this program (or whatever your password program of choice may be) can be used perfectly well for serial numbers too!