Lose Your Mind Development

After a couple weeks, we finally received our Software Publishing Certificate (SPC) from Comodo. All future versions of Printer’s Apprentice will now have digital certificate attached to the main executable file identifying us as the publisher.

So… what does that mean for you, the Printer’s Apprentice user?

The primary purpose of the SPC is to identify the author and prevent tampering with the software after it has been published. So with the certificate attached, you know you are getting an unaltered copy of Printer’s Apprentice, just as we intended it to be.

The SPC adds an additional benefit with Vista. Vista takes advantage of the digital certificate to display the publisher information when a User Access Control prompt pops up. Because Printer’s Apprentice runs in administrator mode, Vista always displays a UAC prompt. (We need admin mode since PA manipulates files in the Windows Fonts folder.)

The left image, below, is a shot of the UAC prompt for our application with no SPC attached. On the right is the prompt after we added the SPC.

Needless to say, the dialog prompt on the right is far less alarming. All future versions of Printer’s Apprentice and Virtual Font Folder will be signed with our software publishing certificate. — Bryan