Linguosoft's dictionary... several nasty habits

Even though I speak English for decades now, a dictionary is something I frequently need. My formal study stopped long ago, and I'm extending my vocabulary by chance - hearing a word the second time in a different context, and then guessing what it may mean is the most frequent method. Seldom I look it up in a dictionary.

Now that I'm spending about half of my average day at the keyboard, having a dictionary at my fingertips comes as a no-brainer. I simply had to have it.

So I found Linguosoft. Tried it a bit, checked a few known terms which didn't fare too well with other dictionaries (English-Serbian, two way), found that it has them and does them justice, and went ahead and bought it.

Now, about three years later, I almost got used to it... EXCEPT:

• It's a regularly paid and registered app, and I'm still bombarded with a nag screen every time I launch it (which is not too often, it stays in the tray, so it really depends on when I reboot, which is about monthly nowadays). I don't really know what the nag screen says, I have a reflex to close it without reading. Guys, I've seen thousands of nag screens. It's quite common to have them... on an evaluation or trial version. But this... this I have paid, didn't even try to bargain or to get a student rebate or anything, I paid what you asked. So why the nag screens? You are trying to sell me more of your products? Well, thanks - now that I am fully aware that you have them, I swear to never ever buy anything else from you. Just because you served sequential ads in something I paid. Sequential as in "it comes modal on top", i.e. you have to react to it, or wait for it to vanish. Sequential ads piss me of enormously - they are the main reason I don't watch TV nor listen to radio, because I can't just ignore them, I have to do something about them (generally wait and yet keep an eye/ear on them to see when they are finished). With software, the "to do something" means

• noticing that something is hiding the dictionary, just about halfway through the search term I was typing
• noticing that it's a window with an ok button
• moving my mouse to it to click on the damn thing
• getting my mouse back into the searchbox (doesn't refocus itself automagically)
• trying to remember what did I want with the dictionary
• It tries to call home, using an instance of IE. How do I know? Well, my IE is used only for testing at 127.0.0.1, and the places on the street it's allowed to visit are on a very short list. The sites which require IE are blacklisted, anyway. So if any app tries to use IE to visit anything, I get the simplest warning from "Internet settings" or some such precisely (or specifically oddly) named service. Calling home is not something I'd expect from an app I paid. It's OK for adware - it has to have launch count; it's OK for evaluation copies - the publisher has legitimate reasons to know how many trials lead to a sale; it's OK for shareware, kind of, the writer is basically doing an evaluation copy on honor basis. But for a paid and registered app, I don't see any good reason. Actually, I see a few, but:
• It may try to check the registration against the database. If it was so, it should have issued any kind of warning over the last year or two, which it didn't. Anyway, the license file is on the disk, and they have my email. No letter, no postcard, so that's not it.
• It may check for an update. But then, why is there no "check for updates" anywhere in the menu, why is there no email if the online check repeatedly fails, and why is there no message after it fails? If this call was for something legitimate, that no user would mind, why doesn't it complain when it fails? It just sits silently, like (as we used to say in high school), shit in the grass.
• It may try to navigate to their news page. Well, maybe, but then why don't I see a browser window with a 404 or something?
• I honestly wanted to tell all this to them first, in person. There's a neat and not too intrusive form for such communications on their website, which did not ask for my SSN, blood sample, fingerprint, rectinal scan or any DNK sample - just name, email and what do I want. Unfortunately, my NoScript seems to have prevented it from sending the stuff to server - it may have failed to set something (though it POSTed fine)... so I got a "please fill the form" (!?) page. Went back to the form page, and everything I just entered was gone, blank (!?). That's bad technique, guys. You don't erase all user input just because you sent the user back to your bloody form page. This is 2012, not 1998. You should do on-the-spot validation, for which you can issue friendly red text right next to the textboxes where the errors happened. This "go back and do everything from scratch" wouldn't get you a C in Webpaging 101 at the University of Lower Bull Creek.
• Um, yeah, I think I filled the form correctly, but it still didn't pass validation, because I signed with a ć in my last name. If that's the case
• Fuck you, guys. You are selling dictionaries. For, you know, languages, which may have different character sets. Surely you heard about those. If you can't handle different character sets, what are you doing in the language market? The link from the menu leads to homepage generated with "content="text/html; charset=windows-1251"- ergo Windows cyrillic, so the dictionary apparently sent some identification to the website.
• There's a "" piece somewhere inside the form page, but that's Russian, not Serbian. So maybe it would have accepted my name if it was in cyrillic? Well it could have said so. Still, why not UTF-8?

So, my bona fide attempt to communicate directly has failed. My rant ends up being blogged here, instead.