The One In Which Paul Talks Out His Hat (metaphorically, since he and hats don’t get along).
During an entertaining aside in Andy Ihnatko’s keynote at this weekend’s Voices That Matter conference, I was reminded of a thought I’d had a while ago: Why don’t Mac desktop applications store their license info in the Keychain?
Complaining about restoring license keys should be just as trite of a humor topic as little bags of peanuts on flights, but it still holds true. Go to restore a machine, or move to a new one with a clean install, and you can write off at least an afternoon launching and entering at least two text fields per application.
Maybe I’m the only one who feels quite comfortable with syncing to MobileMe—I actually consider it the feature that keeps me coming back. (I do know there are people who have frustrating issues, and I truly feel for them, but I continue to believe they are in the minority.) Given that setup, here’s how I’d see setting up a new laptop:
Configure my MobileMe account and sync down the data, setting up my Mail accounts, Address Book and Calendar—and Keychain.
Launch a new copy of my licensed application.
There is no Step Three. Go on your merry way.
I’m not expert enough to suggest that it would improve security of your key, but it sure would discourage casual tweaking more than the plist or hidden file schemes you’d need to develop on your own. Also, separation of license key from a preferences file (hopefully developers are already doing this) allows a user to delete the preferences and start fresh without having to worry about relicensing.
I understand that Keychain development can be convoluted, but is that reason enough to not make the user’s life a little bit easier and your support burden of finding a lost license a little less frequent?
As I said at the top, I realize I’m talking out of my…hat here. I don’t have experience doing this (yet), so I am interested in hearing reasoned arguments. Until and unless this is proven untenable, simply consider it a feature request for your next release.