Dealing with abandonware (2024)

Summary

My father designs, plans and helps in the construction of SPA centers and wellness facilities. He primarily uses mossaics and ceramics. To do his job he uses a program from the early 2000s called TileCreatorPro. I bought this program for him in 2017 from thoughtfishmedia.com (now defunct). He uses it often and has many custom designs in its bespoke format. He spent a lot of time manually filling in the many types of tiles to create a complete inventory. The woes began in 2021 when my dad decided to upgrade the family desktop computer. Before the upgrade he asked me if there will be a problem with the program when going from Windows 7 to Windows 10. I suspected the program would not work at all, so I decided to first email the manufacturer and check if the OS is supported. Then I discovered the website does not exist. Someone did not paid their DNS provider. I decided to google around for the program and queried for the exact name "tilecreatorpro". It returned 4 junk results. Then I looked up "thoughtfishmedia". Boom. I found an article from the owner of the company Andrew Simmons who told CBS news in 2011 that he has recently become the adoptive father of 6 and has no time for software. Can't blame him. Since google didn't yield anything useful, I decided to look inside the program. I asked my dad to send me the installation file and the main binary. I use a MacBook, and this application is Windows only, so executing it is out of the question. I ran strings on it and went through the output. One item stood out to me: <DIV><SELECT class="field select medium" id=Field13 tabIndex=14 name=Field13> <OPTION value=<BeadCreatorPro>BeadCreatorPro</OPTION> <OPTION value=<BeadCreator Publisher>BeadCreator Publisher</OPTION> <OPTION value=<Cross Stitch Supreme>Cross Stitch Supreme</OPTION> <OPTION value=<MuralCreator>MuralCreator</OPTION> <OPTION value=<TileCreator>TileCreator</OPTION> <OPTION value=<TileCreatorPro>TileCreatorPro</OPTION> <OPTION value=<TileCreator Artistic>Til...