Counterproductive nags

The Mac OS X version of Twitteriffic has a shareware style registration model: the idea is that if you like the software you’re supposed to register it. Apparently one of the benefits you get from this is that when you start the registered version up it will, instead of prompting you to click through a pre-filled login dialog, simply log you straight in. Unfortunately there’s nothing in the UI that suggests that this is due to the lack of registration – instead it just looks like poor interface design. This meant that I didn’t even consider registering, the quality of the product appeared so poor. I only found out that this was an attempt at a registration nag recently as a result of a conversation with a friend who had registered.

Of course, almost all  my production computing is done on Linux where this problem just doesn’t exist (my Macs exist to support my iPhone and provide media playback). So much better on several levels.