Introducing CardSharkV

2 CommentsSoftware, Software development, Vista, WPF

Check out this program I’ve developed, called CardSharkV. It’s a digital picture storage card/camera “downloader” with a twist.

It’s a bit of an experiment, and I’m looking for some real-world “beta” testers. My plan is to try my hand at charging for the program. But to see if word will spread, I’m planning to give out 50 or so licenses without charge while I work out any kinks that might be in the program.

If you’re interested in trying it out, download the program, install and run it, and then click the “Request License” button.

Read more about it on the CardSharkV page.

Update (2007-11-25): CardSharkV depends on the .NET Framework 3.0. It’s thus meant to be installed on Vista systems only. If you have XP and the .NET Framework 3.0, it should still work. Also, since I posted the whole thing Saturday night after a whole day of re-shaping my first, never published version, I didn’t test the install too well. I’ve since had a little time to test and found some issues, especially with the license mechanism. I’ve posted version 1.0.2.0 to correct those issues and to improve the installer as well.

2 Comments

  1. Michael Lang

    On Coding Horror
    http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001021.html

    you mentioned… “I recently implemented a registration key scheme for a tiny digitial image management utility I developed, called CardSharkV. Entering the key is done by dragging and dropping a keyfile onto a field in the application. You can drag the file either from Windows Explorer or an email client (the key is delivered via email). I thought this was a good way of avoiding most of the problems Jeff mentions in this article. ”

    Why not just have the user copy the license file into the application folder. Let the application search for a license everytime it is run. For my product I use XHeo which supports this type of licensing (along with others). – http://www.xheo.com

    As of this post, my website is still under construction. In a few weeks it should be complete.

  2. GeekTieGuy

    In essence that’s what happens behind the scenes when the user drags the file onto the field. The key file gets copied to the location that the program checks on every run. In my experience it would be too complicated a task for some users to have to find the right folder to copy the file to. Granted, drag-and-drop may be too hard for some as well, but at least they have one part (CardSharkV) right in front of them.

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