Installing Your License

Wing requires a license in order to run, either a trial license or a purchased license.

Trial Licenses

When Wing starts for the first time without a license, it obtains a full-featured trial license from wingware.com and shows the following dialog:

Trials are valid for 10 days, and can be extended twice for up to 30 days in total. While Wing is running on a trial, this dialog is shown at startup with the number of days left. Once the trial has expired, the dialog offers Extend Trial. To ask for more evaluation time, click on Request more trial time in the dialog, which composes an email to Wingware with your trial license id filled in.

If Wing cannot reach wingware.com to obtain the trial, the dialog offers Try Again and Activate Offline, as described below. Wing runs without any license for up to 10 minutes. After that, the dialog can only be closed by activating a license, or you can save your work and quit Wing.

Activating a Purchased License

Purchased licenses may either be non-expiring Perpetual licenses for a particular major version of Wing or expiring Annual licenses. See License Terms for details on the available license types.

All licenses must be activated on each machine where they are used. To enter a purchased license, press I have a license... in the license dialog at startup, or select Manage License in the Help menu. Then paste or type the license id from your license delivery email and press Activate:

Wing activates the license by connecting to wingware.com via https (TCP/IP port 443). The optional Recovery details are sent with the activation, so that Wingware can find your license if you lose it.

If this machine cannot connect to wingware.com, click on This machine can't reach wingware.com and then Activate offline. Wing shows the license id and an activation request code, which you can enter at https://wingware.com/activate in a browser on another device. Paste the activation key you are given into Wing's dialog and press Activate to complete the activation. The same exchange of information occurs when Wing connects directly to wingware.com.

If activation cannot connect, the license dialog provides a way to configure an HTTP proxy. Wing tries to detect and use proxies by default but in some cases they will need to be manually configured. Please ask your network administrator if you do not know what proxy settings to use. See also how to determine proxy settings.

Obtaining Additional Activations

If you run out of activations, you can use the self-serve license manager or email us at sales@wingware.com to obtain additional activations on any valid license.

Transferring a License

Wing Commercial Use licenses may be transferred from one individual to another, as needed from time to time as employees come and go or change roles. To do this the current user must stop using Wing before the new user starts using the license. The license activation may be removed from the current user's machine as described in the next section.

Deactivating a License

If you wish to deactivate and remove your license id from a machine, click License in Wing's About dialog box and then Deactivate License. This will remove the license activation and quit Wing.

Note that this just removes your license id from the machine. If you are out of activations you will still need to follow the instructions in Obtaining Additional Activations above.

Activating on Shared Drives

If Wing's Settings Directory (where the license activation is stored) is accessed from several different computers, the license must be reactivated once on each computer. The resulting extra activations will be stored in the settings directory as license.act1, license.act2, and so forth, and Wing will automatically select the appropriate activation depending on where it is running.

A Vendor File (described below) can be used to automate activation on each additional computer.

Computer Labs

Computer labs consisting of identical hosts mirrored from a master may accept a single activation of a license for all the hosts. This may be used for site licenses and free permanent educational use licenses as follows:

Note that Wing's acceptance of a shared activation in this configuration in no way relieves you of the responsibility to pay for one license per user.

Vendor Files

To make it easier to reactivate in a case where Wing is on a shared drive, and for computer labs where the above method does not work, you can store your license code in the file resources/vendor in your Wing installation, in the following form:

license="XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX"

This file should be named vendor (without any extension) and go into the existing resources directory in the top level of your Wing installation (or on macOS, within Content/Resources/resources inside the application bundle). You will need to create the file if it does not exist.

Once this is done Wing will read this file at startup and try to automatically activate the license, prompting you only if the activation fails. If many activations are expected, you will need to contact sales@wingware.com to obtain additional activations for your license.

Country or Region of Use

Most Wing Pro licenses are Worldwide licenses that may be used in any country or region. Some discounted licenses may be designated as geographically restricted licenses, for use in a specific country or region. These licenses are invalid and may fail to activate elsewhere.