Okay. I'm ready now.

For what? Premium themes? Why only now? Am I missing something here?

Nah. Just thinking about a bunch of cool changes.

Explain, please...

Once upon a time there was a discussion about hiring the best for a series of themes and I was in the mood to spend some money.

Well, you actually got some Premium themes for free (e.g.; Darktech, Evolve, etc...). The difference is *I* paid for them.

Either way, having Premium Themes available also requires an infra-structure behind them: a Themes gallery on the Winstep web site (some work was done on it but then it was stopped until further notice), a server that can withstand the bandwidth usage (which we have already and I'm actually paying for), and a way to protect those Premium themes from piracy.

Sounds good to me. Just let me know.

jorge did you ever give any thought about tying purchased themes to a persons winstep key, and when they renew their winstep product and receive a new key update the premium themes they own to work with the new key. you're most likely going to have all their purchase in one place anyway.

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

Just adding my twopence here...
The thing about piracy of themes is rather moot; even The Skins Factory, makers of HyperDesk, who were/are making *all* their money from themes, were eventually "forced" to remove all copy protection and sell them unprotected.
You, on the other hand, already have the infrastructure to impose bans on serial numbers, so... you can give the themes for free (to download) but add the provision for non-free themes to be associated with *one* registered user. Simple, you don't even have to add codes, hashes or anything else to the skins. Just add a table in your registered users SQL table, saying which themes they have purchased. So, if they install a new theme, the programme will check with Winstep server, and if it gets permission, it will use the theme. Otherwise... back to default.
So yes, that also means that free versions either won't support paid themes, *or*... you'll have to create dummy entries in your SQL for users that *only* bought a theme and not a full version.
Simple, I think.

Otherwise, you'd have to add a lot of code, and there's nothing in this world that won't stop people from copying the graphics files themselves.
Or, you would have to put everything in some DLL or custom file, encrypted inside, where only Winstep products will have the proper decryption key to extract the imagery and configuration files. Eventually, though, you'd have to extract them *somewhere* in a temp directory, so again... people will copy them, one way or another.

So, I'd select the first option, and then let people choose if they want to pay, say, €5 for a good theme, or just steal it. Can't do much more...

[Chuck, we made this almost simultaneously...]
[Okay, people, stop posting so I can post this...]

I did put some thought into this some time ago. You can decrypt into memory - so you were pretty close, but still no cigar.

skagon may have a point woithout realizing it. if you lock down the loose files or have them only decrypt in memory you stop people from hand editing themes as well. no removing transparency from the top, bottom, or sides of docks / workshelf, no taking a image and tweaking it to you liking, etc. there are some great themes out there for winstep, but some of them do need tweaking to be to the endusers liking.

I know you can decrypt in memory, but... you're already getting flamed by users for supposedly high memory usage. Imagine users using a theme with BIG images!? For example, imagine a theme with some huge images for every single bit. You'd end up with people seeing Winstep use, say, 20, 50, 100MB, maybe even more, of RAM. I bet you wouldn't want to explain how it's not the main programme, but the theme that's using the memory.

Of course, I don't know if Winstep programmes are loading the entire theme in memory, even now. In that case, there would be no change at all in memory usage, so it's all a moot point; go ahead and decrypt in RAM.

Bitmaps need to be cached in memory, otherwise things would become slow as molasses...

Chucky did point out a relevant issue with this, however: if premium themes are encrypted you can't make changes to them.

Well, on that note, maybe we revert to the first suggestion I made, which I think is more preferable anyway, like I said.
However, you *could* just encrypt the configuration files of each theme. Very few people tinker with those anyway... And that way, people wouldn't be able to change the name or hash key (assuming you add one for paid themes) of each theme, so the copy protection on your server would work, again, like I said in my first post.