Starting in 1992, Crossword Express was distributed as Shareware. There were two versions of the program, one for Windows and one for Macintosh, and both were written in the C programming language. Sales gradually increased, and by 2002 it was providing for a comfortable, though not lavish lifestyle. Then, for no apparent reason, sales began to decrease. In fact, the program had become the target of Software pirates who reverse engineered it to remove the registration process, and uploaded the resulting program to every pirate site they could find. Google joined in, and listed all of these pirate sites so that anyone who Googled “Crossword Express Crack” would receive a long list of sites which they could visit, and download an unrestricted copy of my program. I visited many of them, and found two which included download counters, both of which were recording over a thousand downloads a month. Meanwhile, my sales were declining rapidly, and by 2008 they had ceased altogether. My dreams of a financially assured retirement were shattered. I reported these events on my website and foreshadowed that the program would cease to exist at the end of that year. Many of my long term users pleaded with me to continue, and suggested that if I included a Donation button on my site, I would receive plenty of contributions.

Although I wasn’t really convinced, I actually went further and rewrote the whole program in the Java language so that a single executable file would run on both Windows and Macintosh. In the process, I also added many new features. Needless to say, the donations didn't come and after a while I removed the Donation button. So now it is Freeware, and anyone can download it and use it without payment. The strange thing is that very few of the visitors to my site bother to even download it. Isn’t it interesting that people in their tens of thousands were willing to download an illegal pirate copy but don’t want a free legal copy! The only thing I can think of is that when they see that it is now Free-ware they assume that it can’t be much good, and so never get to see the range of puzzles that it is capable of producing. Not just Crosswords, but Acrostics, WordSearch, Sudoku, Minesweeper, Kakuro, etc. Altogether a total of over two dozen puzzles with features you just won’t find in any other software … at least not in any that I have seen, and I have looked at a lot of software.

So ... why not download a copy right now! If you don't you will never know what you're missing.