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A comment on Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator.

Re:Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator by m_eiman on Friday July 30, 2010 @01:41AM (#1560368)
While this was going on, their copy of Bingo Card Creator has been relentlessly polling the server: “Has she bought it yet? Has she bought it yet? Has she bought it yet?” It does this by passing the same random ID to a web service running on the server. If the transaction has been consumated, BCC will learn the Registration Key, and then automatically upgrade itself to the registered version. This removes a /major/ source of customer support complaints, since Registration Key management is a hard concept for many shareware customers to grasp. From the customer’s perspective, she just got done putting her details into Paypal, and by the time she closes the browser (after ignoring the instructions) and goes back to Bingo Card Creator, it already says “Thanks for your purchase!” That little psychic saves me hours every month in support email.

I wish all trial software did this!

A definite usability improvement and just generally better for both parties. The usual email with the reg key for later use should also be sent, of course, but saving that hassle for me when I just want to get on with using what I've just bought is a very nice touch.

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Re:Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator by patio11 on Friday July 30, 2010 @05:04AM (#1560610)
There is a program called Stylizer (visual CSS editing, highly recommended) which inspired this. Their implementation required you to copy to the clipboard (via a Javascript onclick event on the last page of the purchase flow), but the software sniffed the key right out of the clipboard and upgraded itself automatically. This avoids pasting problems. (Useful factoid: many computer users cannot copy/paste, and many who can can only do it with the MS Word copy/paste buttons onscreen.)

I thought "Dang, that is great", implemented it, and then started looking for a way to extend it without requiring people to read the instructions for copying.

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