Promoting shareware is made so much easier with the use PAD files.

What does this file contain? PAD files are XML documents that contain all of the vital information about your shareware application. But why do you need to create a PAD file? Well the main reason is that it saves a lot of time. When you try to submit your free shareware or freeware on freeware and shareware directories you are being asked to submit a lot of information.

So, as you can understand it takes a lot of time to repeatedly input this information to each and every shareware directory. To save you from all this hassle, you can create a PAD file which contains this information and a lot of shareware and freeware directories are able to read your PAD files. This means that you would not have to repeatedly go on giving information about your shareware, simply submit the URL and maybe a custom category.

You will find that a lot of shareware directories allow you to submit the URL of your PAD file. This means that you would have to create and upload the PAD file to your website first before submitting the URL of your PAD file to the directories.

Make sure not to include the version number of your application in the file name as the filename should not change. And in addition to that if you have to update your software and want to include the relevant information in the PAD file, you just need to make changes to the original PAD file uploaded on your website. In this way the shareware directories would automatically make changes to the PAD files and your PAD files would get updated. This goes without saying that the URL of the PAD file must remain the same.

There are many shareware directories that announce any changes made to software. This means that if you release a new version of your software, the directory would announce it on their pages. This generally results in increased traffic to your site. So, creating PAD files to promote your shareware can be a very good idea.

There are a lot of tools available on the internet that help you to create PAD files and you can make use of them. These tools have been developed to make it simple to create a PAD file. We recommend the Association of Shareware Professionals PAD tools.

So, we have just given a cursory look at the whole concept of PAD files and the use that it can be put to. Hope it proves useful to you.

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Today almost every big software company including Microsoft, Winzip, and AOL use trial versions or a form of shareware to market their software.

Why is shareware better than any other marketing method? Shareware is a good way to market software. It allows consumers to evaluate an application prior to making a purchase decision. They can easily determine if it meets their business or personal needs, which usually results to a satisfied customer. In addition because shareware companies are often small they can provide personalized service that is not found in larger companies. Shareware also allows for instant gratification, there is no need to wait for a shipment. Consumers can download and use the software immediately.

Freeware vs. Shareware. As you know shareware is a marketing method for software. Freeware is also a way of marketing software. However, freeware is free so the developer does not ever request any money. Shareware is free to distribute but cannot be used for an unlimited amount of time, unless the developer is paid. Freeware can be used an unlimited amount of time and can be freely distributed; payment is not required. Many developers use freeware to draw attention to their shareware applications.

What is software piracy? There are several kinds of software piracy. One kind of software piracy is hacking into software and disabling the copy protection. Software pirates then distribute or sell the hacked software. The developer does not receive any money for the software the hacker distributed. This is an infringement on the developer’s copyright.

Another technique used by hackers is to illegally obtain a registered copy of software. Pirates purchase the software once and use it on multiple computers. Purchasing software with a stolen credit card is another form of software piracy. Unfortunately there are many kinds of software piracy that has slowed the industry’s growth. In order for developers to continue to develop software and provide support the software needs to be profitable.

Registration Incentives. A registration incentive is something that makes the person using the shareware version of the software want to buy. There are a number of incentives developers use to encourage users to buy. One popular registration incentive is to limit the time of the trial version. This is clever because then the user can’t use the shareware version forever. It encourages them to buy the software so they can continue to use it when the trial period is over.

Often shareware versions will have “grayed out” features on the menu that the consumer can see, but not use. Typically there is a pop-up windows in the software encouraging users to register in order to take advantage of the additional features. This is a popular registration method because if the person wants to do more things with the program, then they are forced to buy the registered version of the software.

Another innovative registration incentive shareware developers use allows customers to receive discounts on other software once they have purchased the registered version.

Developers also provide support incentives. The shareware version of software will have everything the registered version has, however, if a person buys the registered version of the software he/she will receive tech support, newsletters, and upgrades. Developers can also limit the number of times you can use the shareware version of the product. The trial version may expire after 10 uses meaning the user has to register if they wish to continue using the software.

Shareware now and how the term changed. Though the meaning of the term shareware has not changed the perception of shareware has evolved since it began. At first when you had a shareware program there was a note that asked for a donation. Now you are required to pay for the registered version of the shareware program. The shareware industry has also evolved and grown into a billion dollar industry.

Dan Housley is currently a student interning with NotePage,
Inc. http://www.notepage.net developers of SMS and wireless
messaging software, Software Marketing Resource
http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com and Small Business
Software http://www.small-business-software.net

Mac OS X has FileMonitor (shareware), and it’s certainly possible that some of the BSD tools might compile on OS X. But what do you do when there is no support in the OS?

Brute Force

Typically you are interested in new files in a particular directory. You can do something like this:

touch /tmp/testdirb.$$
while true
do
ls /testdir > /tmp/testdira.$$
diff /tmp/testdira.$$ /tmp/testdirb.$$ || echo "changed"
cp /tmp/testdira.$$ /tmp/testdirb.$$
sleep 300
done

If you were looking for a particular file to change, you’d use “ls -l”, and if your interest was in if the file was being used or executed, “ls -lut” would give you that. This example justs echoes when something changes, but you would more likely call some other script that did more testing. One obvious issue that comes up if a file has been created is waiting for the creating program to have finished up: lsof or fuser can help you with that.

But this is pretty crude. Sometimes crude is fine, but if you need to know more often, there’s a fair amount of overhead in this that you really don’t need.

Stat

Linux systems have a command line “stat” that can make checking changes a little less intensive. “stat -t testdir” looks something like this:

testdir 4096 8 41ed 5001 5001 303 82022 2 2b 1d 1070127877 1070128608 1070128608

which is everything you want to know about the file or directory for this purpose. Security Enhanced Linux versions add another field which we need to strip out for our purposes here:

OLD=`stat -t testdir`
# OLD=`stat -t testdir | sed 's/[0-9][0-9]*$//'` # if SE linux stat
while true
do
NEW=`stat -t testdir`
# NEW=`stat -t testdir | sed 's/[0-9][0-9]*$//'` if SE linux stat
[ "$NEW" == "$OLD" ] || echo "changed!"
sleep 3
done

You could get fancier by splitting out the fields into separate variables. That isn’t a lot of fun at the shell level, so we’ll move up a notch.

Perl or C

From Perl or C (and of course many other languages), you can get access to the stat information a bit more easily. Here’s a simple Perl example like those already given:

#!/usr/bin/perl
@info=stat("testdir") or die "Can't stat testdir $!";
while (1) {
@newinfo=stat("testdir") or die "Can't stat testdir $!";
@what=qw(Device Inum Mode Links Owner Group Rdev Size Atime Mtime Ctime PBlock Blocks);
$x=0;
while ($info[$x]) {
  system("/bin/echo $what[$x] $info[$x] $newinfo[$x]") if ($info[$x] ne $newinfo[$x]);
  $x++;
}
@info=@newinfo;
sleep 1;
}

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com