I understand your desire to protect your creation, but if you don't give new users the means to fully test it out, you'll never get them to switch.

Maybe that's your niche - RSS noobs. There are certainly going to be a lot of them for the forseeable future.

But if you want to get someone to switch, you're putting an awful lot of faith in someone making such a switch without being able to see the program in action.

Time-limited is the way to go. Shrook handles this very well. It runs unlimited for 30 days, then goes into a crippled mode where it will launch for only ten minutes at a time. You could even lose that last feature and make it run for just 30 days then out.

You asked. I'm answering. But, as was mentioned above, it sounds as if you may already have your mind made up on this.

Either way, best of luck with the launch!

I cannot think of an application that doesn't apply, in one manner or another, one or both of these.

I can...

I feel where you are coming from. The people posting here have made some very good points too. In the end you have to make the call because we don't know the app yet.

I would love to try it myself but I'll never go off NNWL because PF isn't going to handle my daily feed read. I'll end up reading a couple feeds via PF and then switching back to NNWL for the rest. Eventually I'll just skip the PF part of the routine because NNWL is doing the job. PF never really had a fair shot in this scenario now did it.

You might be better served by going the other direction mentioned above. Give the people their feeds and limit the things that make PF special. We get a taste and we don't depend on NNWL in the meantime.

As for importing OPML files, that doesn't do any good when my OPML file has way more than 10 feeds in it...

Anyway, good luck with the launch. I'm eagerly awaiting both PF and the next release from Brent as well. The news reader market could get very interesting pretty soon.

So, a time-limited version that I can live on, and never launch NNW during the trial, would be better for me.

Speaking of which, you should also import my NNW subscription list seamlessly -- again, no intertia or penalty for trying PF.

Good luck with your launch!

Proware for the full fourteen days, or maybe, instead, a set number of hours run. Maybe a full 48 running hours. Then, after the demo's run out, revert to the freeware version.

I'd think that Freeware would eliminate pretty much all features, and not put a cap on the number of feeds subscribed to. That, and maybe even replace 'Filters' with static 'Folders'. That makes it so that the people who move to PF will be able to keep their feeds, and who weren't paying for the NNW, but using NNWL would be able to use PF. That's cool in two ways. You maintain an active user base, actively submitting bug fixes, if not feature requests. You also simply maintain a larger user base. This is awesome, because if anyone decides to upgrade, and look at the two, and look at the two demo copies, they'll switch to yours.

So, maybe you don't want PF to compete with NNWL, but you might want F(ree)PF to compete with NNWL.

Everybody wins if the user can try out the full feature set. If you could get it to slowly degrade over time (with more and more register messages) then the people that are using it would be co-erced into buying it.

As well, with regards to cracking any time-limited stuff, PF has the the advantage that it must have an internet connection to perform its main task. You could provide a pretty robust time-limitation if you had the memory of how long has elapsed on your server somewhere.

OK, I'll tell you how I would do it then. If you've ever used the program Comictastic you'll see where I'm going.

I would limit the number of feeds to 50. Limit the number of active "filters" to some small amount (3 or so). This will essentially give the user a taste of how the filters will be able to manage a large amount of data. Then to encourage registration I would randomly replace RSS entries with a Why Don't You Register! story. If you've used Comictastic before you'll notice a little poorly drawn comic that comes up randomly between reads. Something that is annoying enough where they will register but not overly so.

This might not adhere to your KISS theory, but will provide a useable product that will still encourage people to register.

However, before you go further you need to confirm whether the download should be a showcase of the full version that is not usable in the long term, or a lite version. If you go for the former, then clearly the showcase needs to perform as well as possible or at least accurately reflect day-to-day use. Therefore, it should not disable features you need to use to make the decision to purchase, nor be limited to less time than that decision takes. Deciding what these are is not easy, but my suggestion (if you can't think of a non-unique feature to disable, which is my first preference) is to allow about thirty days of fully functioning PulpFiction, in all its glory, and then no more new feeds and all filters deactivated. Or if you're feeling miserly, just no more PulpFiction.

If you're trying to create a lite version filters look a likely target to me. You could disable them altogether, or limit them to just one to prove they work. In combination with an infinite or generous but finite limit (of order fifty) on feeds, you've got a useful newsreader, and a good taster of life with the full version. You can live with all those feeds in your inbox, but you'll quickly wish you had more filters to play with.

I kinda get the feeling that you've already made your decision though

I think what you want is fun and light. It won't annoy anyone at first and it will bring their attention to the fact that this was software developed with the intent of providing some income. And once they get a couple weeks into it and they're getting a joke headline thrown into a random feed every couple minutes they'd probably decide to register it (since they've liked the full feature set they've been able to test at their leisure, without any hard cutoff date) and you haven't done anything that stops them from using it right off.

I'm guessing on a user-by-user basis the few big hurdles you have to clear are the potential user:

1) Hearing about your product

2) Getting your product

3) Setting up and starting out with your product

4) Using your product

5) Registering your product

1 Is going to be dependent on your advertising/publicising

2 is going to be dependent on your distribution (dl is easy)

3 is going to be dependent on your demo terms

4 is going to be dependent on your software

5 is going to be dependent on your price and the user.

My advice is don't set the hurdle at #3 too high. Set it too high and people won't even get a chance to get to 4 and 5. And the people that you're trying to trip up won't bother with hurdle 5 regardless.

~BS