Hassleware - AscendantSoftworks

Actually, all you did have to do was contact support, and the second sentence of your post would have sufficed as an explanation. I'm more than happy to help my customers, and very lenient as to how activations are applied and/or transfered, but unfortunately sometimes it requires the customer to contact me in order to do so. I fully understand that this is not perfect, no software is, and I apologize if this is too much of a hassle, sorry to see you go.

As for the other user that you referenced, the large number of emails was the result of troubleshooting a registration problem that in the end was due to the fact that his version of StuffIt was modifying files internal to MimMac, thus damaging the program...it's one thing to diagnose my own software, but quite another to track down adverse effects being caused by someone else's, hence the 19 emails.

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Wednesday, April 02 2008 @ 08:37 PM PDT

not scaleable - decadence

Yes, Benjamin, it's clear you are a nice guy and that you support your customers. But per case authorisation is not a scaleable model for a one man business. It's not scaleable for the customers.

As I said before, if I had to this much babysitting for all the shareware I buy, I would be out of a job as I would be spending all my time just sending out authorisation emails (for what it's worth, I switch one of three Macs at least every six months and when I do a reinstall I've moved to doing clean installs and putting everything I need back on).

Stop worrying about the pirates - they get whatever application they want anyway - and start worrying about the legitmate users.

Take a page out of Dave Nanian of SuperDuper fame from shirtpocket software.

1. The basics are free.
2. Pirating is easy, but you'd be a few dot versions behind.

Anyone who pirates mission critical applications like backup isn't going to be a customer in any case. When the pirates grow up, they'll buy SuperDuper. In the meantime, Dave doesn't have to deal with them. This model scales. Microsoft and Adobe used a similar strategy for years, although Adobe seems to be moving towards making their applications unpiratable. The consequences - huge hassles for legitimate customers with licensing. Those who do pirate the application actually have less hassle in the end.

What is happening is that the Adobe crackdowns and their absurdly high prices ($2000+/suite/workstation) are making the shareware - reasonably priced photo and graphics space attractive again.

Anyway the point is you won't defeat the pirates, you'll just annoy legitimate users with the heavy handed authorization scheme you are using.

KISS is the golden rule. You follow it almost everywhere else. I ask again, Benjamin, what are you thinking about with this heavy-handed and unscaleable authorisation scheme?

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Tuesday, April 08 2008 @ 05:56 AM PDT

lame - DerRotMax

Nothing's funnier than someone who finds the need to lecture a developer. What doesn't make sense is that you state it's too hard to fire off a short email to the dev, but you come here and put ten times more effort into complaining and lecturing, and yet, you never bothered to state if you actually gave the developer a chance to rectify your situation through mature and private communication. Did you?

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Wednesday, April 09 2008 @ 04:51 PM PDT

Literacy - decadence

Nothing is more lamentable than dunderhead friends of developers stopping by and telling versiontracker users not to comment on software and software practices but instead to confine themselves to private emails.

We use versiontracker for a reason:

* to help fellow users
* to keep developers honest

So obviously you don't like VersionTracker (people commenting publicly on software) so stay home next time.

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Monday, January 12 2009 @ 07:14 AM PST