Hi,

I've just finished a program in Filemaker that I intend to try to sell commercially. I have the program completely finished, but now I've run into a couple of problems on how I'm going to distribute it. When I create the runtime and remove the admin privileges it now asks for a user name and password. For this particular program, data security is not an issue and I would like to disable the login at start up. Does anyone know if there is a way to disable the login prompt when it starts up? It wouldn't be so bad, but it has the wrong user name displayed and anyone using the program would have to retype the user name and password every time they use the program. This would cause a lot of confusion for any of my customers. Any help on this would be very much appreciated.

My second problem is with protecting the program from being pirated. I want to have a trial period and then have it set up where they have to purchase a key after the trial expires. I was going to use a program called ExeShield for this, until I discovered that it can't protect it. You can just take the main file and rebuild a runtime with it, which won't have the wrapper on the executable. Does anyone here have any suggestions on how to protect my program from piracy? Thanks.

I have the program completely finished

Actually, you don't, and that's partly the source of your problem here.

You can preset an Account Name and password to open the file in the File Options section. This may not necessarily be a good idea, but you can do it.

As for the piracy issue, that is a much tougher item to address. As you have already discovered, there are any number of ways to install multiple copies and to defeat the "trial" key.

Let's see what some other folks may have to say about this.

Steven

Thanks, that fixed the first problem. Now I need a way to protect it from piracy. I did some searching and I think I've found a way to this inside Filemaker itself, without having to rely on any outside programs. I'm not sure it will be completely secure (nothing is), but it should be enough to deter the average user.

...Now I need a way to protect it from piracy. I did some searching and I think I've found a way to this inside Filemaker itself, without having to rely on any outside programs....

Same problem here. What did you find?