Feeling that our literary expertise needs a boost, one of our members wanted an application to write novels in. The sort of assistive document writer. So browsing around for the most expensive one out there (since we like to live in style), we found Scrivener. Scrivener s trial mode can be defeated by turning the application into a never-expiring trial. There is no loss of options in doing so and we can also get rid of the nag screen. Registration Prompt. Getting rid of this one is fairly easy. When you launch the application you get a big banner “Scrivener is unregistered!” and with buttons to Buy. Enter License and Try. Clearly, this is just a popup that you cannot get rid off. So instead of pressing any button, let us kill the application using Activity Monitor and disassemble the program. Starting with 0x2924f7 we have an unnamed procedure called sub_2924f7 which contains lines such as. but most importantly. which is sufficient to assume that the routine is some callback of the nag screen we get when we launch the application. The whole registration procedure, buy button and trial button handling extends up to 002933af where the subroutine ends. We jump back to 0x2924f7 and follow the procedure down to 0x292558 which is the first jump into the maze of registration procedures. If registers are not equal then the jump proceeds to the usual nagging. We hard-wire that jump to the end of the application in order to get rid of the nag screen. and that is enough to get rid of the nag screen. Expiration Days. Additionally, let s make sure that the trial never expires. So let s pull up a list of symbols and see what we have available. The most obvious of all is. Looking at the procedure the string is in, called here sub_28fcb3. we find stuff like. which is a clear indication that the procedure we are in quits the application when the trial is over. Going to the beginning of the procedure at 0x28fcb3. we follow the code up to the first jump. and following the jne to 0x28ff69 we find the end of the procedure. which is a clear indication that this subroutine is responsible for checking whether the trial has expired. Thus, we go back to 0x28fccc and change the jne into a plain boring jmp. This will make this callback skip all the code related to terminating the application once the trial is over and will just return as if the trial is not over. Job done. When the application is launched, it does not even prompt for registration and if we set the date forward more than 30 days, we get no nag screen.
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