LiveCode Forums.

Hi, is anyone a member of the Association of Software Professionals and if so, have you found it beneficial

Is that the same as the Association for Shareware Professionals, or a different group?
http://www.asp-shareware.org

If a different one I'd be interested in learning more about them.

Hallo Richard, hmm, too many hours on my computer without a break; I did mean ASP, i.e Association of Shareware Professionals...

I've not joined, but I have been impressed with their longevity and the professionalism they bring to the shareware community, and the great work they've done establishing and maintaining a useful PAD format.

My only issue with the organization isn't so much with the ASP per se, but with the term "shareware". While all of my commercial products have a trial mode, and some quite lenient, none of them are true shareware in the formal sense of being completely unrestricted even before purchase.

Back in the olden days that may have been a useful model, but now that computers are nearly ubiquitous in the industrial world, we're now dealing with markets more reflective of the general population, and nothing more than common psychology will often prevent people from paying for software without some clear incentive for doing so.

Accordingly, the term "shareware" has come to take on a connotation of being somehow of lesser quality than ordinary commercial software. That's certainly an unfair perception in many cases, maybe even most, but it's a very real perception just the same.

So between the lower conversion rates and the negative positioning value of the "shareware" label, while it may be a good model for some in the 21st century it's not a model I feel comfortable banking on.

If the ASP changed to "Association of Software Professionals" I'd join in a minute. I've had good interactions with the folks there, and they provide valuable resources.

Another good resource is the alt.comp.shareware.authors newsgroup, moderated by Rev scripter Scott Kane. In spite of the name, the group uses a very broad definition of "shareware" and there's a lot of discussion very relevant to commercial development and marketing by small shops like yours and mine.

Appreciate your reply Richard, thanks.

Yes, ASP seem to have been around for quite a while and as far as I can gather, are fairly well respected. Just wondered if the £50 approx membership is worth it... A quick skim of their pages leads me to think that their pdf resources might be worth it alone...

I agree with you that the term "shareware" has connotations like not being as professional and lesser quality than commercial "business-created" software. But I'd like to think that it's not as bad as it used to be and some positive connotations compared with commercial software is cheapness and possibly unusual, in the sense of being specialised for a particular task/s which perhaps a larger piece of software might not cover.

Thanks for the shareware authors website, I'll have a look at that in the near future; sounds interesting and useful.

Edit: unfortunately, that web address couldn't be found...

alt.comp.shareware.authors isn't a web address, it's a newsgroup (NNTP).

In the olden days that would mean getting an NNTP client like Newsreader, Unison, Jawal, etc., but in more recent years newsgroup support has been built into Thunderbird (which is what I use for NNTP these days) and Google provides a web interface for it:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.comp ... ors/topics

Ah, I understand, thank you! I'll give that a whirl soon.