Graphic License Cards

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Speaking of product registration, a couple of days ago Agile Web Solutions introduced their new graphic license card technology for 1Passwd. The idea is that rather than receiving a text-based software registration key, the key is embedded in an image file. Drag the image file onto the application and it locates the license information and registers the software.

Personally I think this is a very clever idea. I agree with they guys at Agile that this is a very Mac-like solution. I’m not a 1Passwd user, but I almost wish I was so I could try this out.

Unfortunately, at least from the comments posted to their blog entry, the concept is not getting a very warm reception. Although some people think it’s a novel idea, most of the comments seem to fall in the “this is a bad idea and you guys suck!” category.

This main opposition seems to be that it’s a big hassle to store the image file. That’s true: 1Psswd currently can’t store this type of document, and neither can my Safe Place password storage application. However, it looks like this will change for both products soon.

Interestingly enough, nobody’s mentioned that many other software products already use files, rather than text strings, to license software. For example, any Mac application that uses AquaticPrime. Most of these files contain text rather than image data, but they’re files nonetheless.

Many potential users also don’t seem to understand the technology. Some of the commenters think they could receive a physical license card, scan it into a computer, and use that to register their software. That might work if the card included a bar code, but it doesn’t. The image does sport a bar code, but this is obviously just a graphic element, not a real bar code. So this is apparently causing additional confusion for users, which is never a good thing.

I’ll be watching with great interest to see if this idea catches on. In the meantime, they haven’t offered to share any code so that other developers can adopt this technique, and I’m not interested in recreating this functionality from scratch in my program, so I’ll continue my investigation into the currently available product registration options.

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