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Posted by Brad Pineau on August 19th, 2003 at 7:22 pm AST [9817 views]
On July 4th, my software company, Solostar Software, released it's first commercial product, SoloKeep. After submitting the software to various shareware sites, I quickly noticed the site's traffic increasing... On the average day, I would get about 15-20 users downloading the trial version of SoloKeep.
One day, I checked my logs, and I noticed that I had upwards of 100 downloads in one day. "This is great!", I thought, until I looked at the list of referers. All the hits came from this one site that had a key generator for Solokeep available for download, along with a link to my site.
As upset as I was about having my copy protection cracked, I was thrilled that I had so many people using my software. If even one percent of those people who used the key generator liked the software, and decided to buy it, that could turn out to be a lot of sales.
So my question is... is software piracy a good thing? Can it actually help generate exposure and sales?
Posted by Brad Pineau on December 13th, 2003 at 2:16 am AST [32354 views]
For the past week or so, I've been working on a project that required me to start using Visual Basic 6. Coming from a Delphi background, I've got to say that I absolutely hate Visual Basic! I've compiled a list of things I hate about it:- Measurements are in twips, not pixels. Twips are no good for developers!
- Help requires MSDN to be installed. There's no simple help files.
- No easy way to nudge controls by pixels.. err.. twips. (at least that I could find)
- The embedded text editor is just awful.
- Visual Basic doesn't detect type mismatches or undecclared variables until runtime, and you hit that line.
- Control events aren't listed with properies. You need to select the control, then the event from a dropdown in the text editor. (took me forever to find it)
- Controls dont have anchors.
- The Find dialog comes up Desktop center, so on two monitors, it's half on both screens.
- Environment just feels awkward.
- For text editor code completion - you need to double click on the selection with a mouse to select the method/property. (no way to do it with keystrokes without adding a space or a carraige return)
- Controls only have a limited amount of events.
And I'm sure there are others.. I just can't think of them right now. I just can't believe how much better Delphi or C++ Builder is better for Windows development. I mean, you would think that Microsoft would have a better tool for building Windows applications. I realize this list might anger some VB developers, who no doubt like the program. To them, I say "Try using Delphi"!
One thing to note... I did happen to like the fact that in the text editor, you can have a split window for the same file. Very useful for comparing different parts of the same file.