wyDay blog

We've done a ton of work in 2024. A lot of it was behind-the-scenes. In addition to putting the final touches on LicenseChest, here's a few broad things we've been working on:

1. Speed & security: Our servers respond quicker and handle larger loads (all while using less CPU and memory). This means we can serve more customers more quickly. For you this means snappier management of your licenses. For your customers this means even faster activations and verified trials.

   Speed of our servers is something we spend a lot of time and money on. Not only does it make things faster for your customers (activations and deactivations happening faster than the a blink of an eye) but it makes us able to handle larger amounts of customers and “frees up” server resources to handle other planned features.

   And this choice of solving speed with engineering refinements (rather than just throwing money at the problem in the form of newer and more servers) has the added benefit of getting more eyeballs on our code and developing better processes for verifying and securing our code.

   This is a long way of saying we’ve made our services significantly faster and more secure. And we’ll continue to pour a portion of our time and money into making things even faster and more secure.

2. Add TLS 1.3 support to curl on Windows: We've recently added TLS 1.3 support to curl on Windows. Curl is a popular command line tool for downloading files on every platform. We didn't create curl, but we spent the time and money to add TLS 1.3 support to Windows (SChannel specifically) because we (and many other companies) use the curl library to "talk" to the internet.

   So, not only will TurboActivate, TurboFloat, and the TurboFloat Server all support the faster and more secure TLS 1.3 standard, but other apps that use the curl library will get those benefits too.

   We've continued upon our initial contribution with additional refinements and bug fixes (working around Windows bugs, for instance).

   That's part of the beauty of open source: mutually beneficial self-interest.

3. Accessibility: We’ve made our forum software more keyboard and screen-reader accessible. This makes things better for everyone. Also, because our forum software (soon to be open sourced) shares components (both UI and backend) with the soon-to-be-released LicenseChest and refreshed LimeLM interfaces these accessibility changes will benefit all of our customers (and your customers too).

   Accessibility positively effects everyone whether you’re “fully able bodied” or you have any type of neuro-divergence or physical needs outside the “norm”. Our products aren’t perfect, and there’s always new work to be done, but this has been a focus of our company.

4. TA / TF / TFS 5.0 releases for Windows: We’ve released TurboActivate, TurboFloat, and TurboFloat Server 5.0 for Windows. We’ve released it early (before the Unix builds are finished) to work around broken network drivers that Intel and Qualcomm have been releasing lately. Get them now on your API page.

   We’ll release the Unix builds of TA/TF/TFS soon and we’ll have the updated changelog and blog post announcing it when it’s done.

End of 2024 and beginning of 2025 will bring even more behind the scenes progress (TLS 1.3 support for other Unix platforms, updated TA, TF, TFS builds, even faster server performance, etc.). Plus we'll actually release the updated LimeLM interface and LicenseChest.

We also have a couple projects that have been brewing that we think people will like. More about those in the coming months.

We’re very happy with what we’ve accomplished this year. While we always wish we could get more done, but we think we’ve had a good balance of features, speed improvements, and accessibility improvements this year.

TurboActivate and TurboFloat 4.1 are now out! This release is a huge leap forward in quality and features and sets the foundation for the new product releases that will be rolled out over the next 2 months.

So, wait no longer: get the latest TurboActivate and TurboFloat on your API page.

If you're not already a LimeLM customer, sign up now for free!

Here are the big "marquee" features of this release:

NodeJS support

We're proud to be the first commercial licensing to offer true hardware-locked (a.k.a. node-locked) licensing and floating licensing (a.k.a. concurrent licensing) for NodeJS. This means it's easier than ever to sell your NodeJS and Electron apps. You can write in pure JavaScript and let us handle all of the platform-specific details that need to be figured out for fast and accurate licensing.

Learn more over in our "Using TurboActivate with NodeJS or Electron" article (for hardware-locked licensing) and our "Using TurboFloat with NodeJS or Electron" article (for floating licensing). These articles and the accompanying example apps will show you everything you need to know to add true node-locked and floating licensing to your NodeJS app whether you're on Windows, Linux, macOS, or FreeBSD.

Which brings us to our next big feature:

Full, native FreeBSD support

In addition to supporting the "big 3" operating systems (Windows, macOS, and Linux) with this 4.1 release we've added support for FreeBSD! All of our products now run natively on FreeBSD 10.x and above (no Linux compatibility layer necessary).

You can download the latest versions on your API page in LimeLM.

TurboFloat Server behind HTTPS

Prior to this release of TurboFloat Server version 4.1, the TurboFloat Library and TurboFloat Server only "talked" over encrypted raw binary. This was perfectly fine when the TurboFloat Server was behind a corporate firewall and all of the "clients" existed in the same network.

Things got trickier when a corporate end-user decided to host their TurboFloat Server on a public facing computer and their employees ran your app from different networks. If they had a "direct" connection to the server running the TFS instance (whether on the same network or through a VPN), then everything worked fine. But things are rarely so easy in a corporation. Inevitably communications would need to go through a labyrinth of proxies. And, unfortunately, proxies rarely support "raw" transmitted data.

The solution is letting your app (using the TurboFloat Library) talk to the TurboFloat Server over HTTPS. Read more about how to do it here: Configuring TurboFloat Server for HTTPS communication.

Now corporate clients with complicated proxy setups (or anyone else) can have all of the communication happen over HTTPS.

Better client-side trial fraud detection, real-time trial expiration

We're also excited to add improved client-side date/time fraud to the timed-trials functionality in TurboActivate. We improve client-side fraud detection with every release of TurboActivate, but this version took a leap forward.

Additionally, we've added a new function "TA_SetTrialCallback()" that gives you real-time notifications of trial expirations and fraud. This means there's no more need to "poll" TurboActivate functions for the life-time of your process. Just, call that function once, and let TurboActivate handle it.

More consistent Linux ARM builds

Prior to this 4.1 release we made the following ARM builds of our products:

• armv4t, 32-bit little-endian, soft-float

• armv7-a, 32-bit little-endian, soft-float

• aarch64, 64-bit little-endian, soft-float

But we've found this doesn't match the use-case for most of our customers on these platforms, so we've added "hard-float" version for everything other than the armv4t target, and we've added an armv8-a, 32-bit build. So, here's our new targets:

• armv4t, 32-bit little-endian, soft-float

• armv7-a, 32-bit little-endian, hard-float

• armv8-a, 32-bit little-endian, hard-float

• aarch64, 64-bit little-endian, hard-float

What this means in practice is that you can sell your app and target distros like Raspian (and all other popular arm-based distros) without having to re-target your app for "soft-float" support.

A ton more...

In addition to the big features listed here, we have a ton of quality improvements and tweaks to provide a better experience for all end-users. Read a condensed list of changes here for TurboActivate and the changes for TurboFloat.

We've just released TurboActivate 4.0 and TurboFloat 4.0. With these new releases comes some huge improvements and features. Read on for details, or if you want to jump right in, get them on your API page; it's free for all LimeLM customers (whether you're on the free plan or one of our paying plans).

No-click verified trials

Probably the biggest visible feature of this release is the new verified trials functionality in TurboActivate. This means you can offer trials to your users that are verified with our servers, cryptographically-signed, and locked to that machine, all without having to give your customers a product key ahead of time.

What this means is that a potential customer can download your trial software from your website, and begin using the trial immediately. All of the magic of starting the trial for the machine, and making sure customer changes to the machine don't reset the trial, are handled by TurboActivate and our proprietary computer-fingerprinting algorithm.

Don't need to collect an email address

With our new no-click verified trials in TurboActivate 4.0, there's no need to collect email addresses of customers. They can just start your app and TurboActivate & LimeLM will work behind the scenes to start (or resume) the trial of your app.

Trials can't be reset

Another feature about our new no-click verified trials is the fact that the customer can't reset them. Even if the customer completely wiped their hard drive, re-installed their operating system, and re-installed your app, the proprietary hardware-fingerprint algorithm in TurboActivate & LimeLM knows that the computer has already started the trial, and the user will continue exactly where they left off.

You can extend a customer's trial at any time, and do it an infinite number of times

There are no limits to how many times you can extend the trials for potential customers.

Real-time tracking of trials

One of the benefits of this new no-click verified trial system is the ability to track in real-time who is trying your app, how long they used the trial, and how many people are trying it.

A ton of verified trials per-plan

All of the plans now have a verified trial limit based on the assumption that about 5% of trial users convert to be paying users. For example, the Solo plan (the $11/month plan) has a 300 activation limit, and a new 6,000 verified trial limit (meaning 6,000 different computers or devices can use the verified trial of your app).

Improved fingerprinting technology

Our hardware fingerprinting technology has gone through 4 major iterations (and countless minor iterations) over the past decade. This latest iteration is our best by far (and is a major leap over our last iteration). We've eliminated all known real-computer fingerprint false-positives and false-negatives on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

We've put a lot of work and testing in this latest iteration to make sure your customers have a great experience using your app.

New thread-safe design

In previous versions of TurboActivate only a single thread in your app could use the library functions. Now any thread in your app can use the TurboActivate functions and TurboActivate internally handles the access controls.

Per-seat licensing

Added in TurboFloat 4.0 is the ability to limit exactly which username on which platforms can request license leases from the TurboFloat Server. Read more about per-seat licensing here.

Full IPv6 support

All of our products now completely support IPv6, all while maintaining full compatibility with IPv4. This means you can use TurboActivate, TurboFloat, and LimeLM in any environment and know it "just works".

New TurboFloat examples for Delphi and VBA

TurboActivate and TurboFloat work with any programming language or scripting language. But we like to write example apps and help articles to speed along our customers' development. The two newest examples added to the list are for TurboFloat: Delphi (7 and newer) and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) for Windows and Mac OS X.

Tons of behind-the-scenes fixes and speedups

We dedicate a lot of time making online activation as fast as possible for the end-user. This means if we can trim off a millisecond here or a millisecond there we will. And we've been doing that steadily over the past year, making the speed of the activation about twice as fast as it was this time last year.

Also, we've significantly improved our throughput capability (meaning we can handle many, many more activations and verified trials per-second).

This is by no means the end of the line. We have a ton of speedups coming over the next year. The faster we make the activation and verified trials processes the happier your customers will be.

Bug fixes galore

In addition to all of the new cool features, we've been chipping away at bugs. See the following links for a full list of features and fixes:

• Changes in TurboActivate

• Changes in TurboFloat

We're not done not by a long shot!

This year we're making a whole slew of improvements to every one of our products. And we'll be rolling them steadily. The next big update is coming to the LimeLM web interface. It's old, it's ugly, and it desperately needs some love. So that's what we're going to focus 100% of our concentration on over the coming months. And instead of rolling it out in one "big update", we'll roll it out gradually.