I’ve downloaded and bought quite a few software in my life, everything from freeware to complete commercial applications, and one problem I have is keeping all those licenses and serial numbers together. For most software companies, if you’re just getting a license and downloading, and not a physical disk, you’ll just send your registration information to your email address.
Now that I use Gmail, this is great. I just copy the info I need from the email, file, and forget about it. Then, like today, when I had to restore a lot of stuff (which means entering in all those serial numbers again), I can just go to Gmail, search for the name of the program, and there it is!
Unfortunately it wasn’t always. Before I started using Gmail, I was forced to use other solutions, such as saving all my info in a clipboard (which I then backed up to about ten different places!), or even printing and saving all my email records. Of course, things are lost, backups are corrupted, and printed emails are spilled on them.
The team is great, but what about the solution to someone missing something a little different. Well, thanks to Amar Sagoo (author of an equally great feature called deep branding), there’s an elegant, easy-to-use, and inexpensive solution. Actually, it’s even better than that, because the program, which is simply called “LICensed”, is absolutely free.
Licensing is a quick and easy way to keep all your registration information, like the program that makes it, the name and email you used to buy it, the version you have, when you bought it, your serial number,…heck whatever you want…safe.
The license is almost too easy to use. For those who like full control, simply hit the green Plus Sign to create a new entry. You can then go through the bottom portion, selecting the manufacturer of the software from the drop-down list, typing in the name of your product, filling in everything else. Now repeat until you have all the programs.
If you want to complete the project by gathering all your registration info, there is a much easier way. Go to your applications folder and check all the applications you want to enter in the licensed database. Got em all? It is good. Now just drag everything into the upper part of the license window. As you wish, you will see a green ball with a more white signal. Once you’ve released them, each application will automatically enter your database. Every one of them!
Now not all the information needs to be added. For example, most applications don’t know the date they were purchased, and they certainly aren’t set up to spit out your registration code. Instead, you’ll find that the name, version, and manufacturer are automatically filled in, and based on the information stored in your Mac’s user data file, your name and email address will be filled in as well as the current date.
How cool is that? Of course, through all applications you will need to fill in the registration code, and change any of the information you need (for example, before I used a Gmail email address, I sometimes compared applications with my mac.com email address, or Yahoo email email so I know how to enter it.
However, most of the information is already full of wonder, and a definite time saver.
When you are finished, simply close the program. The license will automatically save all the information for you, so you don’t run into your “I forgot to save the last hour of work “ condition to be present.
That’s it! The license is now in version 1.0, so it’s very new, but it’s still very stable (at least it was for me), and it worked quite well. Automatic entry was a really nice feature, in my opinion.
There are two things I would like to see. The first option is to encrypt the database somehow, along with the addition of some kind of password protection. As it is, the licensed database is sitting on my computer. Anyone with a text editor can open it and copy all my information.
One other thing that would be really cool is the ability to use this not only for my applications, but for my website usernames and passwords. It would be really nice to keep all that info together in one place. But before I do that, I’d make sure to keep the database secure in some way.
Finally, at the moment the licensee has no export option. Sure, I could physically copy the database file, but the ability to export the database to a spreadsheet, CSV or something else would be great. The last thing I want to do is my computer crash with all my info in it. I’d rather export it, email it to myself for an email, or something, than risk having all that information go down on the crash
However, as I said, the license is very new, recently released and very young. Hopefully some of these options (if not all) will be implemented at some point. Still, it probably won’t be licensed to use as a manager of my license data, but the look is set now, and will double as design and features are added.
