Trial Systems: The Good and the Bad

From time to time I come across an application I’m not so sure whether I really want it. Recently I had two of these and therefor went with the trial version for now:

  1. Omniweb
  2. and Cocoatech’s Pathfinder

Omniweb has a very nicely implemented trial version system, that let’s you test the application for 30 days. And I mean really test the thing for 30 days and not just count the days after the first launch of it. So if you for example start it on Monday for the first time and the next time on Thursday, you still have 28 days left instead of just 25 or so.

Pathfinder on the other hand does it the “classic” way: Just count the days from the first launch until now. So I once again thought about giving Pathfinder a try today since while Finder is nice and clean, it doesn’t give me the amount of control over file actions I would like to have. Too bad that it’s been more than 21 days since I first started the trial version for the first time.

Naturally this shouldn’t be really an issue since if you’re really intersted in an application you will try it every day for the demo period, but if you’re just at the edge it’s quite easy to just forget about the app and then open it again after the period has already ended.

I’d really like to see everyone take the same approach as the Omnigroup did with the Omniweb trial.