The temporarily unavailable situation began this spring (not 2 years ago!!). My wife's father was in the end stages of Parkinson's disease. With travel and other things related to that, it became increasingly difficult to respond to registrations in a timely manner. So I reluctantly disabled access to the files and registration until I again had the time to respond to emails more frequently than once a week batches. I appreciate the many kind emails I received after making those changes on the website. The files and links to them are back on the SoftWx website now, and I'll have the registration PayPal link back within a few days - well before any newly started trials expire.
Since the time I disabled the downloads, I've been thinking of making some changes to reduce the time I spend doing bookkeeping tasks, and increase the time I have available for doing actual programming on weather related software. I also realized that the current system is far too dependent on me and my availability.
I've decided to make StartWatch completely freeware. I've slightly increased the registration amount for VirtualVP for the first time since I released it over 6 years ago. I'm trying out google ads on SoftWx.com pages related to my freeware programs, although I'm attempting to keep the ad locations not too blatant, and have blocked controversial and overly annoying ads. I hope they're not too obnoxious. I'm looking into moving to a different method of handling trial vs. full version of VirtualVP that will be more automated than the current method that uses emailed registration keys, which should also be more convenient for users. I'm also arranging for a backup third party to be able to continue providing access to VirtualVP should something like this occur again. You would be surprised at how many requests I get for retrieving registration info because of hard disk crashes and the like. I don't want people that have registered to lose the use of VirtualVP because I'm temporarily unavailable. Also, should I become permanently unavailable
, I'll arrange for a permanent transfer of source code either to someone that can continue to maintain VirtualVP, or, barring that, to the community at large.
StartWatch, VirtualVP, and VPLive were all developed using Delphi/Pascal. I do all my development work now using C#/.Net. I would like get sufficiently freed from bookkeeping that I can complete the work I started converting and updating VirtualVP. I'd also like to release more open source C# code for weather software in the future. C# code should be able to be used on Macs and Linux using Mono.
I apologize for any uncertainty and inconvenience this caused.
Steve
SoftWx