We had been throwing around the idea of creating a quick demo that doesn't require signing up and doesn't persist your data. Recently we decided that we wouldn't implement that for now because we consider it a feature that your data persists in one place and want the trial to be full-featured. We also didn't want anyone to be confused about whether the data gets saved ("so I put some stuff in Atombox and now it's gone?").

I like your idea of persisting the data and using a URL as an access key, though. I hadn't thought of that.

Do you think a screencast would be sufficient to get people over the initial stand-off of not wanting to sign up?

Thanks!