Tag: Software

I’ve worked on a number of consumer products in my career, some with registration schemes, some without. What is the purpose of a registration scheme? Are people trying to prevent piracy? Are they trying to keep the honest people honest? Or is there some other motivation? For me, it is about motivating people to purchase the software when the demo has expired (in my shareware world). With some of my products, people use it, like it, and forget that the software is even working, so they forget to register. A registration scheme here has proven to be quite effective on my NotifyMail program. I had another program called PhotoCapture that had no registration scheme (I was young and dumb) and asked people to send me a postcard if they used it. I know it was used on various websites back in the day, but only got a handful of cards. That method clearly didn’t work.

I worked on one product that had such sophisticated registration that it made the product hard to use. That and the fact it was buggy lead to its downfall. So is there a happy medium? In many cases, yes, as long as the software is useful and used frequently. In my opinion, if a product is used infrequently (there are some products that a demo version suffices for some), its value goes down to me and then maybe it needs stronger protection. I was playing around with a program yesterday that I had tried months ago while working on writing something that had a similar concept, but worked in a completely different way. Since I had tried the app, the demo expired and I couldn’t play with it or reset my demo period. After about 3 minutes of poking around with Interface Builder, I discovered a serious flaw in their registration system (Interface Builder is a free developer tool that is available from Apple and ships with every Mac). They had 4 buttons on the registration screen that popped up; register (brings up a dialog to enter your code), purchase (takes you to a website), quit, and try. The try button was grayed out because my demo had expired. So in Interface Builder, I duplicated the try button, linked it to the tryAction, hid the original try button, and then ran the application. Oops. Now I had a working version of the application that I simply had to hit the try button each time I ran it. A simple code/design change could have fixed this. Instead of having a quit and a try button that were separate, have one button that had the title change depending on if the demo had expired and then have the action linked to “dismissRegisterDialog” where code behind that would determine if it should quit or should run in demo mode.

Of course I won’t say which app this was, but a few more minutes with the registration code could go a long way. I don’t think most developers should spend a ton of time on registration schemes as they will be broken by hackers anyway. I think it’s important to make it hard enough that the casual person, even developer, can’t break it. I definitely don’t put in registration schemes that are hacker proof, but they seem to work good enough. In my next product, I think I may take a different approach.

The more I play with OS X server, the more I realize how much Apple tried to slap a GUI on open source stuff and was only moderately successful. Take for instance the WebDAV support. I can give access to a realm to various users and various groups. In my case, users have multiple short names, such as scottgruby and sgruby (I didn’t set this server up). If I give my user access to a DAV realm by dragging it over, OS X server only gives access to the first short name assigned to the user and then even lets me edit the name which makes no sense because if I change the name, I no longer have access to it. I had a user have trouble with this, because she was using the second short name and not the first. Furthermore, OS X server does weird things with the DAV permissions such that even if you have read only access to various parts of a DAV volume, you can’t browse it with a DAV client, i.e. the Finder or Transmit. Apple says this isn’t a bug, but I disagree. Clearly they setup the Apache access permissions incorrectly making it a pain for users to access parts of a DAV volume. So unlike an AFP volume where a user can mount the top level and navigate to directories that he/she has permissions to view, the DAV implementation requires users to mount the particular folder they want access.

I’m not a huge fan of AFP as it doesn’t appear to be the most efficient protocol, allows clients to hang around (using process load) and by default, isn’t secure. You can do AFP over SSH, but you still have to turn on AFP and explicitly tell it to use SSH.

There are some aspects of OS X server that are nice such as turning on the firewall and controlling access, but in my short time using it, I’ve run into a number of bugs (that I need to report) that I’m sure won’t get fixed.

I’ve not been a huge fan of either software installers or uninstallers, but understand the need for installers. Recently I tried out a program on my Linux box and used the installer to install it; I was unimpressed with the software and the mess it scattered over my drive. I looked around, but couldn’t find an uninstaller. Maybe I deleted it trying to quickly recover from what it had done or maybe it didn’t come with one. If it didn’t come with one, it should have. It took me awhile to remove what it installed and then it wasn’t until a day later that I discovered it changed some of my system files. Luckily I had backups of those and was able to restore them. Hopefully I’ll no longer complain about shipping a product with an uninstaller as I now know firsthand how hard it is to remove some programs.

This past week, I started learning about OS X server. The interface really confused me at first as there are lots of different options buried in lots of different places. After a few hours of playing around, I started making headway on figuring out what stuff did, but it wasn’t pretty. I then tried to use the GUI to turn on some other features and found out that it hung the system; I had to use the command line to kill off what I tried. Furthermore, I made a mistake and deleted an SSL certificate; when I went to add it back, it kept failing. The log gave a cryptic error message and after some searching, I found a reference to the keychain. So I used Apple Remote Desktop to connect to the server and look at the keychain (the keychain can’t be access using the server admin software), removed some pieces from the keychain and then I had no problem importing the certificate again. While Apple did an OK job (I’m not impressed with the UI) integrating UNIX tools into OS X, I’m not convinced that the GUI on OS X server is all that useful if I keep having to fight it to get stuff working.

On Tuesday, a friend of mine is going to teach me about OS X server; maybe it will change my view on it, especially if I can get everything working.