You’ve just finished programming your masterpiece, your shareware program is finished and now you want to get the word out and start seeing the fruits of your labor. If you are a shareware program author, the next step in that chain in many cases is generating a PAD file (Portable Application Description) for your program so that you can start submitting it to some of the literally 1000’s of shareware directories out there.
The results of this step is where I often come into play and it never ceases to amaze me just how little time and effort some people put into their PAD files. Running a download site requires that I review scores of submissions to my site every week, almost all submitted using PAD files that are generated by program authors. Many programmers worth anything often spend many months or more on making a useful full featured program and then for some unknown reason only spend a few minutes on their PAD files.
Why is a PAD file so important? For one thing the information contained in that file is what is used by download sites to list your program. Most sites in fact use only the information in that file to generate your listing on their...