Most efficient/secure way to implement trial period in cocoa [closed]

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I am finishing a Cocoa App which will use CocoaFob for licensing and I am wondering about the "most" efficient and secure way to implement a trial period in cocoa.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Regards,

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for security you need to make sure it is not in an easy to spot method, as this can be switched out at runtime. ideally it should be checked in multiple places, where disabling/modifying the method would disable Important chunks of the application(ie loading initial data).

Having said that, how much do you want to risk inconveniencing a genuine user? and how much time can you justify spending, working on something that doesn't give someone a reason to buy your application?

you also have to make sure that keys don't get redistributed, and realistically if someone is determined enough, they will pirate your application one way or another. spend just enough time to keep honest people honest.

also bare in mind that a trial version wont be able to be submitted to the mac app store, and neither will a version with license key management, so you will either be cutting your self out of that market, or distributing a version without license keys, which may get cracked anyway.

hopefully this helps, and i would be interested in reading what solution you decide to go with.

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If your going to implement a time based demo consider using one based on processor time and not an absolute date.The idea being, the user can use your application fully for, say 4 hours, of CPU time. That way they are not locked into a 'must decide by date'. I often have downloaded soomething to look at, then later tried to really use it only to have the trial date expired.

It's not that hard to implement and I'm sure users would appreceiate more.