Help secure a file for a magazine demo

[FMWebschool]

I need to provide a magazine with Mac and Windows demos of a software product we are about to release. The runtimes are created using FileMaker 7 Developer. I have implemented numerous time bomb scripts on previous applications, setting global fields and incrementing, but I was wondering if there was a easy secure way without too much craziness. I was thinking about after x amount of days a script runs and changes or deleted the users account so they no longer have access to certain layouts etc...

Does anyone have any ideas, sample files that may be helpful?

In kindness

[andygaunt]

Stephen -

I have toyed with the idea of deleting the account after x days. Thanks to the new account & security options in 7 things like this are much better. I think this should be fairly simple to impliment.

I also use KeyCodeMaker by NightWing Enterprises (www.nightwing.com.au/filemaker). This is great for demo periods and locking files down.

[Reed]

Why not just have the startup script disable the default account after a certain number of launches. (The startup script would increment a global field to track this)

Then later if you want to allow them to purchase the program, you can send them an account/password for another account that will get them into the file. If you wanted, when that other account was used, another flag could be set to indicate that the product has been purchased, then reenable the default account. Once the product was purchased, the portion of the script that disables the account will not be executed (inside an if[])

You could also do this with date/time instead of launches, but if the user is willing to run with their clock set wrong, they could get around the use of the Get(CurrentDate) function.

[FMWebschool]

Unfortunately being a runtime..the program can just be re-installed. I also

thought of the good old document routine where upon on start-up a search for

a text file begins on a certain directory, if the text file does not exist,

the text file is created. After X-amount of days the database checks to see

if this document exists...if it does it closes. If it does not see the

document, it continues to run and creates the document. This way if they

try to install a new runtime it will check to see if the document

exist

[Reed]

I guess to do this w/o a plugin you could use the import/export script (or applescript/do shell script/send message) steps along with error capture to control your script logic.

making the file invisible ( i.e. .filename) would help make it harder for users to find it, but on OS X, hiding the file outside of the user's home directory could be difficult to find a directory that has a predictable name on every system and that the user would have write privileges to. I guess if you used an installer that could auth....

Another comment about the number of launches... if the application is something that the users would be entering data into, reinstalling the application would cause them to have to re-enter data