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I used to write shareware, including a Netware chat/messaging client (along with Mike B and Doug T), a Windows 3.1 dashboard/navigator (with Mike B), an app installer, the popular X-Wing TSRs (remap, tieremap, and XCD), and a MICR check designer. I had varying degrees of success with those. My most popular shareware app was Super Conversions. It managed to get onto the WUGNET Top 10 Shareware list, published online and in their magazine. Downloads spiked high and I ended up with something like 2,000 registered users, including the US Department of Defense, many environmentalist organizations, and even that guy who drives the original Bigfoot 4×4. Along the way, I developed some ideas on how to write good shareware apps. I thought about that today as I tried to find an application that could convert some animated GIFs created by Vlad for an internal application. I’m writing what I hope will be a companion app to his, so I wanted to make mine look similar. That means grabbing his graphics, mostly GIFs, used in his .Net app and then using them in my Flex 3 app. He has some very nice animated GIFs, but Flex doesn’t natively support them - they have to be converted to SWF format first. So I hit Google up for some programs, and it dutifully returned plenty of results. The first one I tried didn’t work - it distorted the image. One of them didn’t even save the converted file - so I couldn’t check if it worked. 2 of them added some kind of watermark - the first totally obscuring the results, the second wouldn’t loop the image along with the not-quite-so-badly obscuring watermark. These applications were reasonably priced - about $20. I don’t mind paying that much - I’ve bought plenty of good shareware in my time: Goldwave, GIF Construction Set, CuteFTP, IconEdit, Popup Filter, and many more. But… I’m definitely NOT going to buy anything unless I’m confident it will work for me. I finally found the Animated GIF Converter from ConvexSoft. It gave me good control over the animation elements and let me save a converted file that had half of the frames of the GIF. That gave me enough confidence to purchase it. 4 other potential shareware makers lost out on my $20 - if any one of them would have worked, I would have bought it. All that to lead into what I believe are the characteristics of good shareware. Please leave a comment if you have something else to add to the list: 1. It works! Seems simple enough, but so much shareware is disabled to the point where it actually doesn’t do what it says it will do. I’m not going to trust your word on it - I want to see that it works. Some of the things these GIF to SWF converters could have done was be really annoying with popups everywhere, slow start or slow conversion process, half frames (like Convexsoft), super slow animations, limited number of conversions. 2. Simple, Clean User Interface If you have no clue how to make a decent UI, and you can’t even copy existing clean UI standards, then I’ll probably suspect you can’t really write decent code, either. 3. It’s Cheap! I won’t pay more than about $30 for shareware - any more and I’ll start to expect real support or refunds or whatnot. I did sell some shareware for more than that, but it required more support, and I had a nice bound manual that went with it, etc… Don’t worry about the people who will steal it - doesn’t matter if you charged $500 - they’ll still figure out how to crack it and steal it. People will buy what you’re selling - if it works, looks good, and doesn’t cost much.

matthart

3 characteristics of good shareware

Incorporate your business for FREE - Nov 11th (2008)

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