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.

Today we've released TurboFloat 4.3. The marquee feature of this release is that when your app uses the TurboFloat library your app can now release any active leases when a computer goes to sleep. And your app will also attempt to regain that lease when the computer "wakes up".

An example of a computer going to sleep is when your customer shuts their laptop:

The laptop is now asleep. If you were using TurboFloat in your app, and your app had a lease before the computer went to sleep, the lease would be dropped immediately. This frees up the lease to be used by any of that person's colleagues.

Humans are messy and unpredictable

This feature is just the latest example of our focus on real-world user-behavior. A customer isn't going to switch to every app they have open, see if it's using floating licensing, and if so, invoke whatever method you've created to drop the lease while keeping the app running.

That would be a nightmare; no one has time for that.

A real person is either going to just walk away from the computer (and the computer will put itself to sleep after a few minutes). Or the person will explicitly put the computer to sleep (for example by shutting the laptop).

Our job is handling this, and other real-world behavior, so you don't have to.

If you're not already using TurboFloat for your floating licensing, signup for LimeLM today (it's free to try — no credit card needed).

We're proud to announce that we've made it possible to sell your app on a per-process-instance basis. Meaning you can directly limit how many instances of your app your customers can run at any one time.

It's available now for all LimeLM customers!

This new per-instance lease issuance is the alternative to the per-user-session leases that TurboFloat Server issued by default. The differences between the two is shown in the gif above as well as described in "Fine-grained control: per-instance vs. per-user session leases":

With the release of TurboFloat 4.1 we added the ability to issue leases either on a per-process-instance basis or a per-user session basis. This gives you more control over how you sell your software and how it's used by your customers.

For per-user-session leases, one lease is issued per-user session on a machine (real or virtual) that is using at least one instance of your app. For example, "Sally Doe" starting your app on a shared server will be able to start multiple instances of your app and it will use that one lease regardless of how many instances they start in that user-session on that machine.

For per-process-instance leases, one lease is issued for every instance of your app started. Every separate process-instance of your app started will request a license lease whether the separate instances are in the same user-session or are in multiple different user-sessions.

So, how do you use it? Simple: first, make sure you're using the latest version of the TurboFloat Server and TurboFloat library (get them on your API page). Then create a new TurboFloat Server key (or edit an existing one) and select the "per-process-instance leases" option.

That's it. We handle the rest. Easy-peasy, lemon (lime?) squeezy.