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the platform had its share of nag screens in all the shareware that was available but the memory and evidence for this died out since the software ecosystem is

the platform had its share of nag screens in all the shareware that was available but the memory and evidence for this died out since the software ecosystem is mostly dead except for what people uploaded to archive.org EDIT: One of my ideas possibly side projects is to resurrect the WinCE 6.5 platform and build applications for it. Unfortunately the WinCE dev tools are not available anymore. But it is the best minimum viable smart phone platform: touchscreen, camera, external storage through SD/CF cards, audio/video recorder, music player, PIM installed, wireless (IrDA/wifi/etc), GPS, input from soft keyboard/local handwriting recognition, and built in terminal/file manager.

Nextgrid 4y ago
I don't consider shareware a bad thing. If you accept the idea of paid, proprietary software, I think shareware is probably one of the best models out there. It's better than demanding outright payment as it allows you to test-drive the software beforehand and for free occasional usage and it's more sustainable than outright free (as in beer) software since developers need to make a living. Shareware from back in the day nagged you to buy their software but once you did so they left you alone and the relationship between the developer and the user was still a friendly one with the incentives being aligned (the dev wants you to keep using the software and ideally get others to do so), so past the initial nag the software was generally trying to be as efficient as possible and not intentionally waste the user's time. Nowadays, not only is there no way to pay to opt-out from the nagging but the advertising cancer has now contaminated a big part of the IT industry where entire products are build not with the objective to solve user's problems and get paid doing so but to provide an unefficient, half-baked solution to the problem as bait to get users to see ads and generate "engagement".
- guessbest 4y ago
  I remember the shareware banners and popups that would give a time delay to use based on a 10 or 15 second counter and software that would say, "<X> number of uses left. Hope you are enjoying the trial." For a while demo software and shareware software was indistinguishable on the WinCE platform. Palm OS slightly had that problem but not to the extent of WinCE.

Nextgrid 4y ago

I don't consider shareware a bad thing. If you accept the idea of paid, proprietary software, I think shareware is probably one of the best models out there. It's better than demanding outright payment as it allows you to test-drive the software beforehand and for free occasional usage and it's more sustainable than outright free (as in beer) software since developers need to make a living. Shareware from back in the day nagged you to buy their software but once you did so they left you alone and the relationship between the developer and the user was still a friendly one with the incentives being aligned (the dev wants you to keep using the software and ideally get others to do so), so past the initial nag the software was generally trying to be as efficient as possible and not intentionally waste the user's time. Nowadays, not only is there no way to pay to opt-out from the nagging but the advertising cancer has now contaminated a big part of the IT industry where entire products are build not with the objective to solve user's problems and get paid doing so but to provide an unefficient, half-baked solution to the problem as bait to get users to see ads and generate "engagement".

guessbest 4y ago
I remember the shareware banners and popups that would give a time delay to use based on a 10 or 15 second counter and software that would say, "<X> number of uses left. Hope you are enjoying the trial." For a while demo software and shareware software was indistinguishable on the WinCE platform. Palm OS slightly had that problem but not to the extent of WinCE.