The Recursive ISV

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Short post tonight, as I started the day late and have a bunch more work to do before I run out of steam.  We have a gale force wind warning alert current.  This usually sees me offline for a variety of reasons, and of course if we lose power I can’t access anything.

First up.  Yesterday I attended a “school play” that my eldest daughter was in.  As it was a juniors thing it wasn’t a fully fledged production.  It was great.  But I’m biased. <g>  However what was interesting was that many of the Acts relied on pre-recorded Audio. 

They had a great sound system (proper Theater with PA built in) that sounded very nice.  Except they couldn’t find the odd track here and there so lots of delays between Acts and then disaster struck.  The one and only CD player on the system died. 

Obviously a laser related issue, probably having trouble reading due to grotty fingers on the CD.  This caused a bit of a mess and in the end they had to get a tiny portable CD player and point that at the audience. 

What was interesting to me, though doubtless a major PITA for the academic staff, was that this was exactly what MixAction is designed to avoid.  Not being able to find tracks and the unreliability of CD’s in a live situation. 

CD’s have never been great on the road.  As an ex DJ the old vinyl records were certainly one thing - reliable. 

Skipping inexplicably?  Toss a 1 cent piece onto the tone arm and away it played. 

Can’t do that with a CD, even the “pro” ones that have advanced cueing functions.

I would have loved to have told them about the software, but for the moment bit my tongue. 

OK.  The original implementation I was intending to use for serial numbers, based on a rather cool variation of PKV is not ready.  It works and works well but the developer still has it in beta and as he’s very busy right now it won’t be finalized in time for me to use from the go get. 

So I’ve cobbled together something simpler, for the time being.  Still PKV based but nowhere near as many key variations embedded.

I’ve purchased some security software from Oreans today.  As this seems to be the best on the market security wise AFAICT I’ll use it to secure the critical sections.  Basically virtual machine technology is employed to wrap the desired sections of code.

Decided that I’ll be offering a trial download that can’t be registered for the time being.  Customer will need to download the “registerable” version after purchase.

Reasoning is that it’s not a big download and eventually I’ll be adding extra “functions” to the registered version that aren’t in the basic trial - nice to have but not needed for trying out the product - as this is supported by FastSpring who will be handling order processing.  So even if I am cracked, and I dare say I will be, at least they won’t have the full version.  Doesn’t protect against stolen CC’s and subsequent torrent hosting of course.  But then - what does?  :-/

Basically an expiring link to the full version download.

Multiple versions aren’t hard to manage, especially if you’re using build automation software. 

FastSpring will also be handling key distribution as I don’t want to put myself in the position of having to worry about

OK.  More tomorrow.  Got to put in the registration and trial stuff actually into the app, setup the conditional defines etc for builds.

Still have a few things to tidy up and a fair bit more work on the help file.  No installer done yet either.

Quote of the day:
I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception. - Groucho Marx

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.