Newton Register lets you pay for a shareware program with a credit card via electronic mail. Your payment will be sent to the Kagi Shareware clearing house (or another, if you prefer) and forwarded, minus a percentage, to the author. If you have PocketMoney (or any Newton application which supports the Financial Package Posting Standard), the transaction may be automatically entered into your records.
Requirements
Register supports but does not require the ScrollingDoPopup extension; if you have the extension installed, you may try to register any program installed on your Newton, not merely those programs pre-configured in Register’s menu. If you choose a program from beneath the “In Your Extras” line, see the caveat below.
The program you are registering gets a chance to react to your registration; for example, if the program has expired, it might extend the expiration date.
Paying for a Program
To pay for a program, select it from the “Program” pop-up menu, select the price,* and enter your credit card information. Then select “Mail” from the envelope button; Register will look up your name and address and generate the proper form. Double-check the form, then press the “Mail” button.
*If you’re unsure of the price, enter “<” followed by the most you’re willing to pay. A clearing house which supports this feature (none, as yet) will look up the proper amount and bill it if it’s less than or equal to the figure you specified.
Security
Note that Register merely sets up a mail message; the responsibility for actually executing it is yours. In particular, you may not want to risk sending your credit card number via email. If demand warrants, in the future Kagi Shareware may accept PGP encrypted credit card numbers. The “normal” encoding method should discourage casual sniffers, but is not as secure as PGP. Other methods should be used only for registration companies other than Kagi.
Credit Card Numbers
For security reasons, I don’t let you store your credit card number. Sorry. But if you’ve stored the number somewhere else, you can enter the entire number (or NetCash certificate) into the first field.
Caveat
If you try to register one of the programs beneath the “In Your Extras” line, if the author has not given Kagi Shareware permission to collect payments, Kagi will try to email you notification that your registration did not succeed.
Authors interested in receiving checks from Kagi Shareware should send their mailing address and developer signature to shareware@kagi.com. For use of this program with shareware clearing houses other than Kagi Shareware, see below, under “For Programmers.”
Cash and Checks
Kagi Shareware can accept checks in US dollars, or cash in many major currencies. But please don’t send cash or checks until you have received a registration number which must accompany your payment. To do this, select the program you wish to pay for, and send an email message with the payment method set to “Query”. You will receive an email reply with further instructions.
For Programmers
ProtoMoneyButton
If you want to add a registration button to your package, I provide sample code to make this almost trivial, available on my home page. In the simplest case, just make sure that the constants kAppSymbol and kSharewareFee are defined, add the file MoneyButtonProto to your project, and drag out an instance of a ProtoMoneyButton. This will put a “$” button on your package’s status bar. When the user presses the button, Register will be opened with your package and shareware fee selected.
SharewareFee slot
I suggest that programmers who don’t want to use a protoMoneyButton at least put a slot at the top level of their packages named SharewareFee, preferably containing an integer number of US dollars.
Register will also report the value of a top level slot named Version or VersionString.
The :IPaid() Method
After the user has successfully entered his credit card number and selected your package, Register will try to call your top-level method entitled “:IPaid(frame)”, if it exists. See the sample code for details; one possible use is, if you have a nag dialog for unregistered users, to disable it for a week or two, presumably until you’ve been notified of the user’s registration.
An Open Standard
The sample code shows how to do a great deal more customization. In particular, you don’t have to have your shareware payments sent to Kagi; you can even use my sample code to call another registration package. The sample code and the :ExternalRegister(RegFrame) protocol are free to be modified and used for any reasonable purpose, specifically including use with competing registration programs and shareware clearing houses. I intend this to be a fully open standard.
Other Clearing Houses
A competing shareware clearing house can even supply its own encoding method by using the EncodingType and EncodingFunction slots in the registration frame. The “normal” encoding scheme is proprietary to Kagi; I will supply the decoding algorithm for the “minimal” encoding scheme to any clearing house of whose good faith I am convinced. Note that the supplemental encoding function in the sample code is for illustrative purposes only and may not deter a skilled cryptanalyst.
Shareware Fee
Register itself is freely distributable but not free; it’s shareware, but with an unusual fee structure. If your users use it to register your software with Kagi, you don’t have to worry about the fee; my 1% royalty will be collected by Kagi. For use with other shareware clearing houses (or if you have the payment sent to you directly), the shareware fee for using Register (not the sample code) is still 1%, payable by the recipient of the payment.
Where to get…
ScrollingDoPopup
Hardy Macia’s ScrollingDoPopup extension should be available on CompuServe, America OnLine, eWorld, the University of Iowa Newton Archive <URL:
ftp://newton.uiowa.edu/pub/newton/>, and on my home page at <URL:
ftp://ftp.rahul.net/pub/flasheridn/
hardymacia/ScrollingDoPopup.sit.hqx>
Financial Package Posting Standard
The specifications for the Financial Package Posting Standard should be in the above places or
<URL:ftp://ftp.rahul.net/pub/
flasheridn/hardymacia/
FinancialPostingStandard.txt>
My Stuff
The registration sample code should be at <URL:ftp://ftp.rahul.net/pub/
flasheridn/developers/
RegisterSampleCode.sit.hqx>
The latest version of Register should be at <URL:ftp://ftp.rahul.net/pub/
flasheridn/Register.sit.hqx>
Kagi Shareware
1442-A Walnut Street #392
Berkeley, California, 94709-1405 USA
Email: shareware@kagi.com
FAX: +1 510 652 6589
Don’t send checks or money to this address until you have received confirmation that Kagi can accept payment for the program you are trying to register, and a registration number, which must accompany your payment. Cash received without a confirmation number may be donated to charity, and checks may be shredded.
The Author
Please send any comments about this program to FlaSheridn@kagi.com.
It was inspired by Peter N Lewis’s Register for the Macintosh, but problems with the Newton version are not his fault. Thanks to Chris Owen for the credit card checking code, and to Hardy Macia and Rob Bruce for the buttons.
