So, I work in a fairly small IT section. We have a trouble ticketing system that about half of our end users use. Some of my coworkers don't really do much to encourage our end users to use the system we have in place. The end result? Constant interruptions because end users will get us by IM or come to our offices directly for trivial things. This can obviously make it difficult to do a good job of writing code.
Now, I suppose I could just say "hey, would you mind filling out a trouble ticket next time?", but then I'd come off as the bad guy because others won't do that. I also don't want end users to feel that I'm unapproachable. I just want them to understand that there's a proper way to ask for help.
So what's the best thing for me to do in a situation like this?
Make it appealing to do so.
Mention to the user that issues with trouble tickets are viewed by the entire development team and have been found to get fixed significantly faster. Say that anything without a ticket has the potential to get lost in the shuffle. Provide them outward facing links so they can view the progress and developer/support comments on their ticket. Provide email alerts so they feel like they are part of the process and have instant information about their issue.
Make it as frictionless as possible.
Make the user entry part of the system as easy to use and as intuitive as possible. No one likes filling out tickets and I'm certainly not going to jump through any hoops to do so. No logins, no sign-ins, just type out my issue and contact information and go.
Talk with your team.
Ultimately, no amount of hard work on the above systems is going to matter unless your team and you are on the same page. Call for a team meeting and talk with them about the issue. With your boss present, try and put it in terms he can understand. Mention valuable time lost, issues tracking customer problems which aren't in the system, etc, etc.
Sounds like your manager is letting you down by not forcing users to submit a ticket before getting help. The problem starts there and only continues to your co-workers allowing such behavior. We use redmine at work for application support and have made good progress in telling users "submit a ticket and we will look in to it" but it has to be a consistent voice from all people involved.
Use a little psychology on them. For people that don't send in trouble tickets, remind them that 80% of the people in their department use the ticketing system. Even if it is a lie, it will encourage good behavior because of the bandwagon effect. Remember that the more similar the person is to demographic statistic, the more likely it is to influence their behavior. So "your immediate coworkers" will work better than "people in this entire company."
The people that use the ticketing system should get a gold star, no, seriously.
There was a very brief article in February's Harvard Business Review on using social pressure to influence behavior. It discussed some new research but the article didn't include references.
You don't. Users hate that stuff even I do. Instead your policy should be "don't make me think". You have to collect all you need yourself and automatically handle this in an invisible way to your users. After they opt in at install.
You probably won't make much headway unless you convince your coworkers to use the system first. After you've all agreed on the process you want, then you can talk to your users. If everyone on your team is playing by the same rules, you can probably force your users to use the system by having slow turn-around times for issues not entered into the system, or maybe even forget them altogether.
However, even IF you can convince both your coworkers and your users to enter tickets, you'll probably still find the tickets are incomplete/not informative. We've all seen plenty of tickets like "Feature X is broken, fix it plz" and offer no other information. Depending on the number of tickets you get per day, I would probably just bite the bullet and walk over the user and see what their problem is first hand.
We often log a ticket on the user's behalf in this sort of case.
At my old workplace, I was told that nothing could be done without a trouble ticket. When I asked why, I was told that the support team's productivity was measured by using trouble tickets. This had the effect of forcing me to use trouble tickets (since they were required), and giving me the motivation to do so (I didn't want my coworkers to look bad).
At my new workplace, all technical support is subcontracted out. I literally have to call tech support, and they create a ticket on my behalf.
Also - stop encouraging the behavior. Use your IM filtering options to only appear online to the dev team. Don't check your email - or setup filters that filter the high priority stuff (your boss, your dev team) to your inbox, and everything else to a folder you check once a day or once every other day.
Simucal's advice is good. You -will- have to tell them to "file a ticket" instead, at some point. If you ask them after the fact, they aren't going to care because they got what they needed.
A great way to handle this is to have a dedicated person for support. My team did this, and it helped our productivity immensely and eliminated at least 90% of our interruptions.
Barring that (or lieu of), you can each rotate daily as to who gets to handle user requests. This has the upshot of making a trouble ticket more-or-less required; its needed to keep track of what happened in the request when someone else starts working on it. Over time, this also brings more cohesion to your processes: people create small scripts to do common tasks, work that is done is moved into revision control, etc.
Related
I want to show ads on my Free WPF Application? Could you tell me how to do that? I just want to show ads and want to change ads after say 5minutes.
You need to use the Adsense api sample code is here go for xml
I believe Jojo is correct but I would like to further ad that even if you could I would think twice about this. There are much better ways for you to bootstrap cash injectors to your application. Applications that are ad injected tend not to preform as well as ones that are not.
Any application which you consider to be worth more than free but are afraid may cause less downloads if not paid for should at the very least have an easy way to donate. People often overlook this fact and yet many people I know, if given an application that solves there problem will donate 5 or so dollars. This may not sound like a lot but it is essentially money for nothing given that there is no reason NOT to implement this.
Another option is to see if you can bootstrap a similar application with yours. If this is done in a professional manner with the ability for the user not to install the second app then it can be a good source of income and no nasty adverts for the user to contend with.
The last option is to ask yourself if you would pay for it? Many people give away applications that people would happily pay a few dollars for. Consider a marketing campaign that says great software at a great price. Many people (Myself again) have paid for software that works nicely. Sure you can probably find a free cracked version but a lot of folks respect the fact that people should be paid.
Some examples of paid for software that is doing well is pinnicale profiler, ultramon and regex buddy. All of which I have paid for and would happily pay for a second time round.
As far as I know you are not allowed to put Adsense in any kind of application other than website.
I have put captcha on my blog, I still get spammers, is there a script somewhere which allows them to do this or do they do this by hand ?
It depends on what type of CAPTCHA you're using. Some methods for generating CAPTCHA challenges are easily circumvented with optical character recognition. Some methods have inherent flaws that let spammers through without ever passing the challenge.
"Secure" or "good" CAPTCHA schemes that haven't yet been beaten by automated means can still be beaten by humans. One popular technique is to let the spamming software retrieve the challenge and then display it on a different website where unsuspecting humans solve it in order to gain access to some other resource.
Finally, some spammers just enter solutions by hand, because they're just that determined to annoy you.
Wikipedia has a good article on CAPTCHAs including their circumvention.
Depends which captcha and which spammers.
some captchas are weak and easy to break, or there are a limited number of them and libraries exist. Otherwise somebody is just doing it manually, either because they really want to spam you, or they are being paid in some cheap sweatshop.
recaptcha seems to be one of the more resistant ones as used here.
Best answer I ever heard was that a spammer company hired out people in India to type in the answers. It was cheaper and more accurate than writing software.
Some people hire people from third world countries like India to break the CAPTCHAs. They just hire them thru Mechanical Turk or oDesk. Technically, there's a way to stop this as well. Just use a geo IP service to track the location of visitors. If you get a sudden influx of visitors from a country you normally don't get visitors from, and they have an abnormal browsing pattern (like typing a CAPTCHA every 20 seconds), then it's safe to assume the visitor is someone hired to break your CAPTCHA. Sure, people can circumvent this by hiring ppl in the US or whatever, but I dunno many Americans willing to work for pennies to do such menial tasks.
It depends on the captcha, of course, but most likely it's being done by hand. If your blog is popular enough, it might be worth someone's time to go through and do it themselves, in which case...you'll just have to pay attention and delete as necessary.
Most of the spammers use OCR to circumvent captcha. I have launched recaptcha on my blog and have not seen not one spam message since. The down side to recaptcha is that the images are really hard to make out, I guess its hard for the spammers too.
The form that currently loads during when our beta WinForm application starts up is one that shows a vast array of buttons... "Inventory", "Customers", "Reports", etc. Nothing too exciting.
I usually begin UI by looking at similar software products to see how they get done, but as this is a corporate application, I really can't go downloading other corporate applications.
I'd love to give this form a bit of polish but I'm not really sure where to start. Any suggestions?
EDIT: I am trying to come up with multiple options to present to users, however, I'm drawing blanks as well. I can find a ton of design ideas for the web, but there really doesn't seem to be much for Windows form design.
I have found that given no option, users will have a hard time to say what they want. Once given an option, it's usually easier for them to find things to change. I would suggest making some paper sketches of potential user interfaces for you application. Then sit down with a few users and discuss around them. I would imagine that you would get more concrete ideas from the users that way.
Update
Just a couple of thoughts that may (or may not) help you get forward:
Don't get too hung up on the application being "corporate". Many coprorate applications that I have seen look so boring that I feel sorry for the users that need to see them for a good share of their day.
Look at your own favourite UI's and ask yourself why you like them.
While not getting stuck in the "corporate template", also do not get too creative; the users collected experience comes from other applications and it may be good if they can guess how things work without training.
Don't forget to take in inspiration from web sites that you find appealing and easy to use.
Try to find a logical "flow"; visualize things having the same conceptual functionality in a consistent way; this also helps the user do successful "guesswork".
You might look to other applications that your users are familiar with. Outlook is ubiquitous in my company, and we were able to map our application to its interface relatively easily, so we used that application as a model when developing our UI.
Note that I'm not suggesting Outlook specifically to you, just that you look for UIs that would make your users' learning curve shallower.
The problem here is that you need some good user analysis and I'm guessing you've only done functional analysis.
Because your problem is so abstract, it's hard to give one good example of what you need to do. I'd go to usability.gov and check out the usability methods link, especially card sorting and contextual interviews.
Basically you want to do two things:
1- Discover where your users think how information is grouped on the page: This will help flesh out your functional requirements too. Once you've got information all grouped up, you've basically got your navigation metaphor set up. Also, you can continually do card sorting exercises right down to page and function levels - e.g. you do one card sorting session to understand user needs, then you take one group of cards and ask users to break that down into ranks of importance. Doing so will help you understand what needs to be in dominate areas of the screen and what can be hidden.
2- Understand what tools they already use: what they do and don't like about them. You need to get a list of tools/applications that they use externally and internally. Internally is probably the most important because there is a fair chance that most people in your business will share an experience of using it. External tools however might help give you context into how your users think.
Also, don't be afraid to get pencil and paper and sketch up ideas with users. People generally understand that sketches are a quick and useful way to help with early design work and you can get an immense amount of information out of them with just simple sketches. Yes, even do this if you suck at sketching - chances are it won't matter. In fact, crappy sketches could even work in your favour because then nobody is going to argue if buttons should be blue, red or whatever.
Frankly, a form with a “vast array of buttons” needs more than a little polish. A form dedicated solely to navigation generally means you’re giving your users unnecessary work. Provide a pulldown or sidebar menu on each form for navigating to any form.
The work area of your starting form should provide users with something to actually accomplish their tasks. Among the options are:
A “dashboard” main form, showing summarized information about the users’ work (e.g., list of accounts to review and status of each, number of orders at each stage of processing, To Do schedule). Ideally, users should be able to perform their most common tasks directly in the opening form (e.g., mark each account as “approved” or not). If further information is necessary to complete a task, links navigate to detailed forms filled with the proper query results. At the very least users should be able to assess the status of their work without going any further. Note that different groups of users may need different things on their respective dashboards.
Default form or forms. Users of a corporate application typically have specific assignments, often involving only one to three of all your forms. Users who work with Inventory, for example, may almost never need to look at Customer records, and vice versa. Users also often work on a specific subset of records. Each sales rep, for example may be assigned a small portion of the total number of customers in the database. Divide your users into groups based on the forms and records they usually use. For each user group, start the app by automatically opening the user group’s form(s) populated with the query results of their records. Users should be able to complete most of their work without any further navigation or querying.
If all else fails, open the app to whatever forms and content were last open when the user quit the app. Many corporate users will continue to work tomorrow on the same or similar stuff they’re working on today.
Analyze the tasks of your users to determine which of the above options to use. It is generally not productive to describe each option to the users and ask which they like better.
BTW, “Reports” is probably not a particularly good navigation option. It’s better if you consistently identify things primarily by what they show, rather than how they show it. Users may not know that the information they want to see is in a “report” rather than a form, but they’ll know what content they want to see. Reports on inventory are accessed under Inventory; reports about sales are accessed under Sales.
Have you tried asking your end users what they would like? After all they are the ones that are going to be using the system.
I use components from the company DevExpress. They have some really cool controls (such as the Office 2007 ribbon), form skinning utilities (with a vast amount of different skins), and a load more...
If you want to check it out they have 60 free components - if its corporate though you might have to check the licence but you can get it at... DevExpress 60 Free
I suggest starting with the design principles suggested by Microsoft: Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines
Some places to get ideas for interaction designs:
Books
About Face 3 - The Essentials of Interaction Design
Don't Make Me Think (this is focused on web design, but many of the principles carry over to Windows design)
Web Sites
Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines
In addition, many applications have free trial versions that you can download to determine how they handle user interaction. Also, don't discount items on your desktop right now.
Do you have any statistics or insights concerning what the most commonly-used or important functions might be? If so, you could use that to pare down your "vast array of buttons" and highlight only those that are most important.
That's sort of a trivial example, but the underlying point is that your understanding of your audience should inform your design, at least from a functional perspective. You might have past usage statistics, or user stories, or documented workflows, or whatever - even if you're drawing a blank right now, remember that you have to know something about your users, otherwise you wouldn't be able to write software for them.
Building on what they already know can make it easy on your users. Do they live in Outlook? Then you might want to mimic that (as Michael Petrotta suggested). Do they typically do the same thing (within a given role) every time they use the app? Then look for a simple, streamlined interface. Are they power users? Then they'll likely want to be able to tweak and customize the interface. Maybe you even have different menu forms for different user roles.
At this stage, I wouldn't worry about getting it right; just relax and put something out there. It almost doesn't matter what you design, because if you have engaged users and you give them the option, they're going to want to change something (everything?) anyway. ;-)
I've been asked to write code/design things in an interview. Sometimes even to provide code samples. Very reasonable and very wise (always surprised when this DOESN'T happen)
I had a job a year or so back where the code was so awful that I would not have taken the job, if I'd seen the mess I had to deal with ahead of time. And I can't tell you how many horrendous databases I've had to work with.
Is it out of the question for me to ask them to provide a code sample and to view their database design? Assuming I'd be happy to sign an NDA, part of me feels it would insane to take a job without examining the codebase or database I'd be working with.
Anyone done this?
Update
This would be something I would ask later in the interview process, if things were proceeding well and I felt an offer was forthcoming.
It's also in the context of working in a small shop or small project as my preference is to avoid places that use phrases like "get a developer off the floor"
You can definitely ask. The answer may be "No," but nobody should consider that to be a bad or inappropriate question.
If they won't show you the code, you should definitely take that into account when you decide whether you want to accept an offer. I would take it as a sign that at least one of the following things is true:
The code is so horrible that they know you'll run away screaming.
The company has an ultra-secretive trust-nobody culture (which I would hate).
The company thinks they have such amazing code that just glancing at it would turn you into a superstar competitor. (In other words, they're self-deluded morons.)
They have glaring security holes that they hope to keep secret.
The people who are interviewing you don't know how to get the code themselves. (In which case you are not talking to the right people.)
I'd be more interested in seeing the company's systems - i.e. test framework, release process, autobuilds.... The presence or absence of those would tell me a lot more than a couple hundred lines of code.
I did ask: "Can I see some code and talk to programmers working here?"
The employer replied: "Sure! Come you can directly talk to our lead programmer of our information system!"
What an honor!
they showed me concept papers
I could talk to the lead programmer
they showed me a small part of a very new project telling: "this is just a prototype, direct3d is so sketchy, that's why this code is so messy"
It turned out that:
the lead programmer left the day I arrived
the software he had the lead, was a big mess
somehow I ended up spending 50% of my time, fighting against the mess
None of the candidates we have interviewed have ever asked that; however, many of them have been co-ops/interns in the company so they are familiar with our code...
Having said that, it is highly unlikely we will show our code to ANY candidate, regardless of an NDA. I would be happy to answer questions about what technologies we use, what system we use for revisions, practices around, etc. Actual code though? No.
Also in a large enough system (as ours is) someone can just show you the "best" code there is...and you would be where you started :) As for a database design...both companies I have worked at have had enormously large databases (university, corporate company)...so that wouldn't work either.
I've asked this in interviews with Xerox PARC, a startup, and Yahoo.
At PARC they sat me at a workstation with the code I'd take over if hired, went over the structure of the codebase super-briefly, and left me alone for around 20 minutes. This was enough to get an idea whether I could stand working with it, though I'd have liked some more time, like an hour total. Afterward I asked about a design decision that seemed dubious, and we chatted about the design and the style in general. This didn't just tell me more about the job, it told them more about me: did I explore their code top-down or bottom-up, what did I pick up on or ask about, etc. Valuable all around.
At the startup, they set up a separate meeting on another day, bringing in the author of the code (who wasn't an employee); we sat down at a laptop and went over things together. It was an unusual request to them and I think I had to sign a new NDA. This was once again worthwhile: my earlier interviews hadn't really cleared up what this fancy AI language was all about or what they'd want me to do with it, and sitting down with some concrete code blew away a lot of fog.
At Yahoo, I didn't see much of anything; I don't recall just what their response was. If I'd seen the code I ended up dealing with I might have had second thoughts (though it worked out all right in the end). (Both of the above codebases that I did get to see seemed generally nicer; the PARC one was open-sourced later on.)
In all these cases I shared some code of my own with them.
If you are going to do this then I think you need to give them a little warning so they can prepare an NDA and get an apppriate environment set up in which you can see it. Also be prepared to dedicate a little time to understanding why the code is in the shape it is.
If you turn up at your first interview and say, right, can I see the code, all but a very few people will say no. And not necessarily because they are evil and don't want to show you, but because it just isn't as simple as saying yes.
In my experience as a recruiter for a large software company it would have taken a considerable amount of time for us to disclose enough detail of the code and internally developed frameworks for any candidate - however bright - to be able to make a meaningful judgement of its pros and cons. We would only contemplate doing that if we were serious about hiring them.
If I were asked that question I woul say yes, come back another time and we'll arrange something. I would get a trustworthy developer off the floor and have them bring a laptop to the next interview and show a little of the code.
The reality is pretty much any software project which is of a reasonable size and has been in existence for more than one release will have some horrible scary rubbish in it.
Similarly to some of the other responses, I've never had a candidate ask to see our code. Even if they did I've be very careful to do so and most likely would not. As Swati mentions, pretty much any non-trivial system will have sections that look good so even seeing the code won't help that much.
Better than looking at actual code is the Joel Test. Basically it is 12 yes or no questions that you can ask an employer. The more yes answers, the better the work environment is expected to be. It's obviously not a hard and fast "rule", but it would seem to indicate those companies that take code (and coders) seriously.
I can't think a reason for not showing some classes or talking about the architecture they're using. From my point of view it's like asking them to show you where are you going to work (room, table, chairs, teammates...).
Anyhow, asking for it will show them you're interested in best practices and also that you're not desperate about finding a job at any price, and don't know how this can hurt.
Go to open source projects. There you don't have to ask for permission to see the code.
It can't hurt to ask and this is a very good idea which I am going to add to my checklist of questions to ask employers.
An interesting idea, but I don't know how many companies would go for it. I know we can't do it where I work now.
I think the biggest problem you're going to have with this is that I have found that a lot of people take offense to people not liking their code. It's like criticising someone's therapist, it's just not a good idea to be an outsider and do it. Seeing the code and then not taking the job could give you the reputation that you're arrogant or not good enough to work on the code and that's why you didn't take the job. It might save you from getting job you don't want, but it could give you a negative reputation down the line. I live in a sizable city, but the IT people still know one another and word spreads. People in our field have egos, and it's easier to trash somoene else's reputation than it is to admit that code you wrote isn't up to par.
Even if they showed you some code, would that be sufficient for you to come to a rough conclusion about the quality of code that you would be spending time with? For example, at my previous place, one of their products was a large e-banking middleware application. The core of the application was in C++ and designed and written in a great way. However, the extensions (which by far covered a large part of the application and its various different versions), which were in C++ too, that were mostly coded by the less-experienced and less-knowledgeable developers were a pile of crappy code (which I had to fix and work with or write from scratch at times) slapped together to just somehow work. If I had asked them to show me a snippet of the code during the interview, and they had shown me some of the core stuff (the extension code actually mostly contained the client-specific business logic so it wouldn't make much sense without the business-domain knowledge, etc), I would've thought that the overall quality of the code is good (which was not completely the case).
More important than to ask for code snippets, I believe, is to ask them for which source code control product they use (run away from companies that answer "Visual SourceSafe") and which methodology they use: "Agile" or "Scrum" sends positive signals, CMMI usually means company loves bureaucratic processes, if they give you a "huh?" then you're warned ;)
I think this is a great idea; however, as an employer, I would be hesitant -- even with an NDA -- to provide an interview candidate samples of real, working code unless I was pretty sure I wanted to hire the person.
The problem is they will show you a little bit of code, but each of their programmers will write code in a different way. You are unluckily to have to work on the part of the code base that is well written.
Asking to see their coding standard and how they enforce it is more likely to be of use.
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I wrote a utility for photographers that I plan to sell online pretty cheap ($10). I'd like to allow the user to try the software out for a week or so before asking for a license. Since this is a personal project and the software is not very expensive, I don't think that purchasing the services of professional licensing providers would be worth it and I'm rolling my own.
Currently, the application checks for a registry key that contains an encrypted string that either specifies when the trial expires or that they have a valid license. If the key is not present, a trial period key is created.
So all you would need to do to get another week for free is delete the registry key. I don't think many users would do that, especially when the app is only $10, but I'm curious if there's a better way to do this that is not onerous to the legitimate user. I write web apps normally and haven't dealt with this stuff before.
The app is in .NET 2.0, if that matters.
EDIT: You can make your current licensing scheme considerable more difficult to crack by storing the registry information in the Local Security Authority (LSA). Most users will not be able to remove your key information from there. A search for LSA on MSDN should give you the information you need.
Opinions on licensing schemes vary with each individual, more among developers than specific user groups (such as photographers). You should take a deep breath and try to see what your target user would accept, given the business need your application will solve.
This is my personal opinion on the subject. There will be vocal individuals that disagree.
The answer to this depends greatly on how you expect your application to be used. If you expect the application to be used several times every day, you will benefit the most from a very long trial period (several month), to create a lock-in situation. For this to work you will have to have a grace period where the software alerts the user that payment will be needed soon. Before the grace period you will have greater success if the software is silent about the trial period.
Wether or not you choose to believe in this quite bold statement is of course entirely up to you. But if you do, you should realize that the less often your application will be used, the shorter the trial period should be. It is also very important that payment is very quick and easy for the user (as little data entry and as few clicks as possible).
If you are very uncertain about the usage of the application, you should choose a very short trial period. You will, in my experience, achieve better results if the application is silent about the fact that it is in trial period in this case.
Though effective for licensing purposes, "Call home" features is regarded as a privacy threat by many people. Personally I disagree with the notion that this is any way bad for a customer that is willing to pay for the software he/she is using. Therefore I suggest implementing a licensing scheme where the application checks the license status (trial, paid) on a regular basis, and helps the user pay for the software when it's time. This might be overkill for a small utility application, though.
For very small, or even simple, utility applications, I argue that upfront payment without trial period is the most effective.
Regarding the security of the solution, you have to make it proportional to the development effort. In my line of work, security is very critical because there are partners and dealers involved, and because the investment made in development is very high. For a small utility application, it makes more sense to price it right and rely on the honest users that will pay for the software that address their business needs.
There's not much point to doing complicated protection schemes. Basically one of two things will happen:
Your app is not popular enough, and nobody cracks it.
Your app becomes popular, someone cracks it and releases it, then anybody with zero knowledge can simply download that crack if they want to cheat you.
In the case of #1, it's not worth putting a lot of effort into the scheme, because you might make one or two extra people buy your app. In the case of #2, it's not worth putting a lot of effort because someone will crack it anyway, and the effort will be wasted.
Basically my suggestion is just do something simple, like you already are, and that's just as effective. People who don't want to cheat / steal from you will pay up, people who want to cheat you will do it regardless.
If you are hosting your homepage on a server that you control, you could have the downloadable trial-version of your software automatically compile to a new binary every night. This compile will replace a hardcoded datetime-value in your program for when the software expires. That way the only way to "cheat" is to change the date on your computer, and most people wont do that because of the problems that will create.
Try the Shareware Starter Kit. It was developed my Microsoft and may have some other features you want.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2005/aa718342.aspx
If you are planning to continue developing your software, you might consider the ransom model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Performer_Protocol
Essentially, you develop improvements to the software, and then ask for a certain amount of donations before you release them (without any DRM).
One way to do it that's easy for the user but not for you is to hard-code the expiry date and make new versions of the installer every now and then... :)
If I were you though, I wouldn't make it any more advanced than what you're already doing. Like you say it's only $10, and if someone really wants to crack your system they will do it no matter how complicated you make it.
You could do a slightly more advanced version of your scheme by requiring a net connection and letting a server generate the trial key. If you do something along the lines of sign(hash(unique_computer_id+when_to_expire)) and let the app check with a public key that your server has signed the expiry date it should require a "real" hack to bypass.
This way you can store the unique id's serverside and refuse to generate a expiry date more than once or twice. Not sure what to use as the unique id, but there should be some way to get something useful from Windows.
I am facing the very same problem with an application I'm selling for a very low price as well.
Besides obfuscating the app, I came up with a system that uses two keys in the registry, one of which is used to determine that time of installation, the other one the actual license key. The keys are named obscurely and a missing key indicates tampering with the installation.
Of course deleting both keys and reinstalling the application will start the evaluation time again.
I figured it doesn't matter anyway, as someone who wants to crack the app will succeed in doing so, or find a crack by someone who succeeded in doing so.
So in the end I'm only achieving the goal of making it not TOO easy to crack the application, and this is what, I guess, will stop 80-90% of the customers from doing so. And afterall: as the application is sold for a very low price, there's no justification for me to invest any more time into this issue than I already have.
just be cool about the license. explain up front that this is your passion and a child of your labor. give people a chance to do the right thing. if someone wants to pirate it, it will happen eventually. i still remember my despair seeing my books on bittorrent, but its something you have to just deal with. Don't cave to casual piracy (what you're doing now sounds great) but don't cripple the thing beyond that.
I still believe that there are enough honest people out there to make a for-profit coding endeavor worth while.
Don't have the evaluation based on "days since install", instead do number of days used, or number of times run or something similar. People tend to download shareware, run it once or twice, and then forget it for a few weeks until they need it again. By then, the trial may have expired and so they've only had a few tries to get hooked on using your app, even though they've had it installed for a while. Number of activation/days instead lets them get into a habit of using your app for a task, and also makes a stronger sell (i.e. you've used this app 30 times...).
Even better, limiting the features works better than timing out. For example, perhaps your photography app could limit the user to 1 megapixel images, but let them use it for as long as they want.
Also, consider pricing your app at $20 (or $19.95). Unless there's already a micropayment setup in place (like iPhone store or XBoxLive or something) people tend to have an aversion to buying things online below a certain price point (which is around $20 depending on the type of app), and people assume subconciously if something is inexpensive, it must not be very good. You can actually raise your conversion rate with a higher price (up to a point of course).
In these sort of circumstances, I don't really think it matters what you do. If you have some kind of protection it will stop 90% of your users. The other 10% - if they don't want to pay for your software they'll pretty much find a way around protection no matter what you do.
If you want something a little less obvious you can put a file in System32 that sounds like a system file that the application checks the existence of on launch. That can be a little harder to track down.