Free Trials Done Wrong.
A common response in people justifying piracy is that it is often times easier and better to grab a cracked version than some ridiculously limited and crippled demo version. In this, I wholly agree.
I grabbed a piece of software that initially prompted me to register and had a convenient "Not Now" button. I promptly clicked that button, as I'm not going to spend $40 to see if a piece of software works.
30 minutes later, it tells me, "Oh, your 30 minutes is up so I'm going to quit now." Application state gone, only option is to buy the product. This is a bad experience.
These are the types of behaviors that make it easy to justify pirating software. It's cool to nag. It's cool to have a trial period of the full version (thank you TextMate). The idea of exiting after 30 minutes is ridiculous.
So, instead they lost all possibility of ever getting a customer on my end and likely anything else that they do. If they pay such little attention to user experience, it certainly isn't an app I would grow to rely on.
Please, if you are working on a desktop application and want to let users try it then do that. Let them try it as if they own it. Just remind them that they don't. Intruding in their work flow is a straight trip to the garbage.
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