Improve new license entry experience

[Jason Clark]

My license just expired. I purchased a new one. This was my experience updating my license key.

1. License expired a day or two ago. I received no notification, but I did automatically get a grace period of a few days, so I didn’t know. Fortunately I had a reminder on my calendar, so I checked it. FIRST REQUEST: Notify of upcoming license expiration.
2. Purchases a new license through the illuminatedcloud.com website, via Fastspring. Got my receipt and license key right away; this was great.
3. Ready to enter the new license, in IntelliJ I chose Tools → Illuminated Cloud → Configure Application.
4. Although my old license had expired, I was still in the grace period. The purchase license and enter license buttons were disabled. My only choice was to deactivate the current license.
5. At this point, the system force- reloaded all open Illuminated Cloud projects in order to disabled the IC features.
6. I was able to select Enter License, and paste in my new code.
7. Once again, the system force- reloaded all open Illuminated Cloud projects, in order to re-enable the IC features.

And now I’m up and running. But steps 5 & 7 weren’t really needed. SECOND REQUEST: Could you enable the ‘Enter License’ option always, or maybe when the current license is near/past expiration? Would have prefered to just swap without reloading my open projects. Not a big deal (and only once a year), but still a minor annoyance.

ps - thanks for another great year! Can’t imagine working without Illuminated Cloud.

[Scott Wells]

Hi, Jason. I've implemented some licensing improvements in this week's release including notification of upcoming license expiration (within 14 days) and even when your license has expired and you're in the grace period (which has been extended from 3 days to 7 days). I also addressed most of the weird corner cases where IC2 wouldn't behave quite as expected/desired when, for example, you have an expired license but trial days remaining, perhaps from a trial extension while waiting for your IT purchasing dept to buy a new license for you.

For next week's release I've implemented a few others that I think should take care of the rest of what you've requested here. The purchase button will be enabled when you're unlicensed or when the subscription for your entered license key has lapsed, even during the grace period. You'll also be able to enter a license key at any time, or even enter the same license key with a different client ID if you just want to update that aspect. And of course when you do so, there's no close/open/close/open project behavior.

[Jason Clark]

Oh brilliant - your timing could not be better. I had to transfer my license key from my second (desktop) machine to a temp machine (laptop) recently (while traveling), and I’ll need to swap it back in a few days. I’ll make sure to update before I do so, to try the new experience. Thanks!

[Scott Wells]

Delivered in 2.1.9.6. See the release notes for details about what was included in addition to what was delivered in 2.1.9.5.