Mike Walters: >"wait 10 seconds before you can click OK" nag screens. That's > sort of like pinching the user and saying, "Send me money or > I'll keep doing this!"
For games with levels, the solution is simple: just restrict the number of levels you can play in the demo. For all other apps, it might not be clear where to draw the line between demo and registered version. I think that the wait screen is perfectly valid. The user is really pinching himself if he wants to continue playing past the freebie period without purching the unlock key. One thing that is clear, however, is that if one of your goals as an author is to make money, you absolutely must cripple your app. If you give it away for free and expect people to register out of the goodness of their hearts, you will only earn a small fraction of what you would make if you force people to register before giving away the store. How you manage the tradeoff between baiting the user and blocking them from getting what they want for free determines how successful your app will be. The reason I'm so certain about the cripple vs non-cripple issue is that a few years ago, I read an article that essentially put that debate to rest. I had saved the article, but seem to have lost it now. I would have loved to post a link to it here, but I couldn't find it on Google. Maybe someone else on this group has it and could post it? The article detailed a study of shareware registration for a PC application that would print MS help files. At installation time, the app would have a 50% chance of deciding whether to cripple itself or not, but either way, it would still ask for the same registration fee. Based on the code provided the user, the author could tell whether the user was registering a crippled or non-crippled version. The study was rather scientific, and spanned both a good length of time and quite a large user base, and the end result was that the crippled version outsold the non-crippled version (if memory serves) by about 10 to 1. -Jason -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
