So I'm having trouble writing a widescreen DVD; I suspect what I actually need to do is upgrade to the all-singing, all-dancing Adobe CS3 Production Premium, which includes Encore and should be able to do everything I want and more. (I don't want much. Honestly.) Before paying lots of money though, I did the "sensible thing" and tried various things I didn't have to pay for, either because they're free or because they're already on my computer.
In the process of doing this, I fired up something that came with one of my DVD writers, probably in the last twelve months. I got the following error box:
This is a perfect example of why URI design is important. Had the program been looking for the URI http://liveupdate.cyberlink.com/product/PowerProducer;version=3.2, say, then there's a reasonable chance that URI scheme would have stayed. That hostname doesn't provide a website (although the root URI returns an HTML document typed as application/octet-stream), just a service. Make the URI easy, and you won't have this problem.
Of course, you should also catch errors. And present them usefully ("I cannot check for updates at this time - perhaps this version is too old and no longer supported?"). But hey, that's experience design, which is nothing to do with the point of this post. (And, it seems, nothing to do with the creation of Cyberlink's PowerProducer product.)
In a telling coda, the URI for the PowerProducer page doesn't really look like it'll last that long either: http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/products/main_3_ENU.html. Sigh.