GET A FREE COPY OF SAWMILL!

 

Earn credits that can be put towards the purchase of Sawmill. Just follow these instructions:

• Download the 30-day trial version of Sawmill 8.

• Use it for as many hours as you need to earn your license, with each hour worth a $40 discount (i.e. five hours for a 1-profile Lite license, ten hours for a 5-profile Professional license, etc.). Keep careful and detailed notes (an average of at least one note every 10 minutes) of everything you do with it (an example), anything that you find confusing, and anything that doesn't work.

• Send your notes to support@sawmill.net, and we'll send you credit towards a free license for Sawmill!

The details: Help us test Sawmill

We need testers to find bugs and other problems in Sawmill. We need input from a wide range of testers, describing what could be done better, what doesn't work right, and what just plain doesn't work. That's why we're offering this special deal: test Sawmill for us for an hour, and you'll get a $40 credit toward the purchase of Sawmill. You can repeat that as many times as you like. That means that if you test it for ten hours, you'll get a $400 credit, or enough to purchase a 5-profile Professional license for Sawmill (or test for five hours to get a 1-profile Lite license).

Some extra details:

• Type up everything you do during testing, even if it works fine. We need to know what has been tested. Your writing doesn't have to be pretty, grammatical, or well-spelled, but we need to be able to understand what you're writing. We need details--as a guideline, your report should have an average of at least one comment or note for every ten minutes you spend, with notes more frequently where possible. Here's an example of the kind of notes we're looking for. This is a particularly good example, and your notes don't need to be quite this detailed, but this is something to shoot for.

  Windows users: if you use Notepad, you can press F5 to insert timestamp information easily.

  vim users--add this to .vimrc to allow use of F4 to insert time:
  

  :imap <F4> <c-r>=strftime("%H:%M")<cr>.

• If you find a genuine, reproducible bug which causes Sawmill to crash, or a security bug which provides a means of gaining inappropriate access to the computer running Sawmill, you'll get an extra $100 bonus credit. We really want Sawmill to be stable and secure. We get to decide whether the bug is genuine and reproducible. However, if you can crash your own copy of Sawmill repeatedly with it, it probably qualifies. If you can gain unauthorized access to a computer via Sawmill, it also qualifies. Operating system incompatibilities do not normally count (e.g. running Sawmill on Windows 3.1, an unsupported platform). However, even operating system incompatibilities can qualify if they affect enough people unreasonably, for instance if the presence of a commonly-used DLL on Windows causes Sawmill to crash. When in doubt, report it and we'll decide.

• If you find a genuine, reproducible bug which does not cause a crash, or an error in the documentation or the interface (even just a typo, bad punctuation, or bad grammar), you'll get an extra $40 bonus credit. Find ten little problems and you've earned a free 5-profile Professional license. You can even get this credit for finding errors in our web pages.

• Credit can be applied only to the purchase of Sawmill--you cannot use it for any other purpose, and you cannot convert it to cash.

• Testing credit is prorated for partial hours. I.e. you'll get $20 credit for 30 minutes of notes.

• Credit can be applied toward purchases even if you haven't earned a whole license worth. You can spend two hours testing, and get an $80 discount, regardless of which license you're buying.

• You can do any amount of work you want, as long as it's at least one hour. You can work one hour, and get a $40 discount from it, or work two hours and get an $80 discount.

• We keep track of the credit you have accumulated, and we can tell you at any time how much you have. At the time that you wish to purchase at a discount or get a free license, please send an overview of the hours you've spent and the bugs you've found (in addition to the detailed notes, if you haven't sent them already) to support@sawmill.net and we will arrange for the discount or free license.

• Keep your version of Sawmill up to date. We ship new versions every few weeks, and you should download each new version as soon as it ships. Bugs found in old versions may be fixed in the latest version, and we cannot give credit for bugs found in old versions, unless those bugs were found before the new version shipped. Your old notes continue to be worth credit, even if they contain reports of now-fixed bugs, but any new notes you create after the version ships must be based on the new version.

Applying Your Credit

There are several ways you can use credit. If you have more credit than the license you want to buy costs, you can just send email to support@sawmill.net, asking for a free license, paid from your credit. Please say what kind of license you want, e.g. 5-profile.

If the license costs more than your credit, you can email us and ask for a discount code from your credit. We will send you a discount code you can use in our online store, to pay by credit card or PayPal. You can also list the discount code on a purchase order.