It's probably time to end the dongle

[Kylerk]

Just wanted to reiterate a long held opinion that the dongle is really holding TVpaint from being more popular. It makes the software feel antiquated and completely out of touch with modern software development.

I have this thought every day when I need to pull the dongle out of my bag and connect it to my computer.

And I thought it again when I was looking at videos about the new Wacom MobileStudio computer that looks absolutely fantastic. But guess what! It doesn't have a regular size USB connector. It has 3 new USB type C connectors. So this means that I would need some weird adapter along with the dongle to get TVPaint to work.

http://www.wacom.com/en-de/products/pen ... ifications" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I'm sure you have had long arguments in your office about this issue. Whoever is the holding out for the dongle is likely scared of software pirates or something. A dongle does very little to protect you from pirates, they will always find a way. More importantly it is scaring away customers and making people like me who could be your greatest supports annoyed.

TVpaint is better than Photoshop and Toonboom when it comes to making animated art, and overall it is a great piece of software, but it is being unnecessarily burdened by this notion that we need some weird physical DRM when the rest of modern companies just use different forms of digital DRM with very few issues. Adobe's cloud has treated me very well. I move between computers easily and it always seems to work.

And if you think that just because not many people are complaining about it now means that it isn't a problem, I don't believe that is true. This is likely the biggest problem your company faces, and if I was a part of your team, it would be my main concern until it is fixed.

I think you make a good product, but please, please make it more reasonable to use in this modern era of DRMed software.

Kyler

[schwarzgrau]

I don't know if this is really the biggest problem they face, but you're right that it will become a bigger issue, through the abolishment of "classic" USB ports in modern mobile devices. I'm also not a big fan of the dongle, but compared to the Adobe Cloud system does it allow me to use TVPaint on my three different computers. Something which would be at least a pain in the ass with the cloud model.
However I'm pretty sure the TVPaint team is already aware of the problems attached to the dongle solution and as far as I remembered correctly they already have some future plans about it, since the dongles they currently use are not produced anymore.

[Fabrice]

Hi Kylerk,

I already partly answered here :
http://forum.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php? ... 541#p91797" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It shouldn't be long before we launch something new.
A lot of work has been done already.