Still Thinking About Product Registration

Friday, February 15, 2008

I mentioned previously that I was trying to decide how to handle registration for my new shareware application.

Option one was to go with either eSellerate or Kagi.

I did download the eSellerate Embedded Web Store to give it a try. Unfortunately, after a few hours of research, I gave up. The documentation is comprehensive on how to use their web site, but not how to install their framework in a Cocoa application. Instead, they offer a sample application for you to reverse engineer. I’m sure that I could have figured it out, but if they don’t even bother to document step one, then I’m not going to assume things get better once I get deeper into their product.

And I’ll admit, I’m really not that excited about getting locked into a proprietary system. Especially one that starts at 10% of my gross profit. Before I downloaded eSellerate’s product I decided I liked it better than the Kagi options. Now that I’ve given up on eSellerate, I don’t see the value in spending much time with my second choice.

Option two was the AquaticPrime framework. This looked like a much better option to me. I get full control of the interface, and they don’t want 10%. In fact, they don’t want anything. Really attractive.

Unfortunately, I think distributing license files is much more complex and error-prone than is necessary for an inexpensive shareware application. I’d much rather just display a dialog asking the user to enter their name and an activation code.

So I’ve decided to go with option three: I’ll be rolling my own product registration routines. I’ve done it before for my 4D projects, so I’ve already got the technique worked out. I’ve also already got the back-end (in-house database and PHP/MySQL web site) set up to support it. Now I just need to implement the Cocoa version.

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