Yesterday I downloaded a PDF splitter to use on my MS computer at work. And I got bitten, hard. I wouldn’t exactly call it crippleware; most people expect even crippleware to be minimally useful. This piece was not.<\/p>\n
I shall quote the message that I sent to their support email addy:<\/p>\n
I am writing to let you know that your free trial download for the PDF splitter is not a useful piece of software at all, for the simple reason that it intentionally and flagrantly renders the split documents useless by inserting the “watermark” — a large message spanning the diagonal of the page, in cherry red characters, saying “in order to remove this message please visit our website” — across every page of the document.<\/em><\/p>\n Obviously, I don’t expect a response from them, at least not a useful response. Obviously, I would never have bought the software to begin with were I to have had a good experience using the software — I admit it, I’m cheap.<\/p>\n And sure, I should have thought things through a bit better and (as I mention below) install Ghostscript to do the job. Sure, I was in a bind and embarrassed myself and my employer in front of the client.<\/p>\n So of course, the following reactions come to mind:<\/p>\n – What, the programmer(s) wanted to show off their skill at insering “watermarks”, and that are ugly to boot? And on a personal level:<\/p>\n – I should install ghostscript and run: Of course in the short term, what I did was speak with the secretary very nicely, who has Adobe Professional to split the file, and she did.<\/p>\n My point should be clear: If you want to sell your software, go right ahead; I won’t be buying it anyway. And if you want to give away a trial period during which people can, well, try the software, go right ahead; I may try your product during the trial period. But why give a free trial period (in the case above, 15 operations) that reflects poorly on the company and actually annoys your potential customers?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday I downloaded a PDF splitter to use on my MS computer at work. And I got bitten, hard. I wouldn’t exactly call it crippleware; most people expect even crippleware to be minimally useful. This piece was not. I shall quote the message that I sent to their support email addy: I am writing to … <\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Were it to put a far more discreet message along the top or bottom, this might be tolerable however ugly it would be; however, it is hardly of any value to anyone wishing to take advantage of the “15 free uses” or somesuch in order to evaluate the software before deciding to purchase it; in fact, I expect that most people downloading the evaluation copies are immediately turned off by this malfunction.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n– Or did the programmer or company put more thought into the dollar signs floating in front of their eyes than, oh, I don’t know, producing a piece of software that someone may actually wish to buy?
\n– Or did the Marketing Department convince the programmer’s supervisor that the watermark had to be put in?<\/p>\n
\n“gswin32c -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -dFirstPage=m -dLastPage=n -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf”
\n– I should stop trying to delude myself that there won’t be an ever increasing number of useless PDF tools out there that require you to buy the product before getting a true evaluation copy;
\n– When using my work computer, stop using a Windows mentality, and apply a thing or two that I know how to do under linux.<\/p>\n