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1. 
   Review - DoneEx XCell Compiler

   1.9.9 (Dec 10, 2009)

   The list price for the pro version is $249 and there is no mention that it is only a license for 1-year. Buried in the lengthy text of the license agreement is the statement that there is a annual renewal fee.
   
   The "ANNOYING TRIAL NAG" is an offensive pop-up and it cannot be switched off. If you want to offer your customers a free trial version of your product they will have to endure a pop-up that takes control of their computer every 7-minutes and there is a count-down timer that prevents them from closing the "ANNOYING TRIAL NAG" pop-up for 10-seconds. We tried it in a focus group and our customers were furious about it.
   
   The activation of the full license version of their software (and any that you produce using their software) is done manually. The customer must find the computer ID and email it. They then have to wait for up to 48 hours to receive the registration key by return email. I only had to wait for 2-hours for the key to unlock XCell but that is a long time in this world of automation. As a user of the software it means that I have to have a person on duty 24/7 to issue registration keys if I don't want customers to suffer the long delays.
   
   The software package gives me control over the wording of the expiration warning and the "ANNOYING TRIAL NAG" message but nothing else. There are several screens that the customer sees where they are told to “contact your vendor” or “Trial version of application has been expired”. I would like to write my own text for those messages but there is no way to do that. There is a button on several messages that says “Mail to author”. I cannot change the message on the button or in the email that the button generates.
   
   The documentation is written in a kind of pigeon English that is sometimes difficult to understand.
   
   The product needs more flexibility for users but the company is defensive about the software and not open to making any changes. When I voiced my opinion about the limitations of the product I got this response:
   
   “Your complaints seem far-fetched because the realization of features you complained about (as the removing of annoying window from Trial/Demo feature) leads to fatal destroying of the product tasks and goals.”
   
   The software business is about more than just writing code. Software needs to be adaptable to customer needs and I have found that Xcell is not.
   
   William Dunn, President
   SunCam.com