Archive for the Category: MG

Adobe Ships Creative Suite 3 and other news

April 16, 2007 burakk

Flash CS3 Professional is available for purchase now along with other CS3 applications and CS3 suite versions, though I don’t see a trial download available yet. Rumors were that the big day would be April 20th, it turns out it was today. (UPDATE: Trial downloads became available on May 9th 2007).

If you have missed it, Flash Player 9,0,45,0 was released on 12th. This is the CS3 update and Flash CS3 ships with that version.

Another press release is about Adobe Media Player (Philo),which is being developed using Apollo and will be available before the end of this year. Me thinks it was time Adobe had an Adobe Media Player and it will probably help Apollo runtime distribution at first and then benefit from it later.

Todays ‘renaming’ news was a name change from MS. The ‘Flash killer’ WPF/E or WFP/E or something – god I never learned the name- got a very creative new name: Silverlight (There was nothing new released). MS didn’t stop there and while at it, renamed the acronym RIA as ‘Rich Interactive Application’! I didn’t realize this and read it (even the full phrase) as ‘Rich Internet Application’ until I saw JD’s post.

News from us: As we have previously announced, new version of ASV which supports Flash CS3/AS3 will be available in 3 months from today (All ASV 5 purchases since the start of March is considered as ASV 6 purchases for upgrade purposes). We may also have a beta earlier open to customers only. Our other applications, UAE and ASR, will also be available, hopefully in a very short time, after ASV release. Captionate version 3 will be available as a free upgrade in June.

Also posted in Flash 2 Comments

SWF Encrypt, SWC Encrypt, Do you need them both?

February 8, 2007 burakk

… If you have a Flash obfuscator, it’s easy to obfuscate SWF files in SWC files using your current obfuscator. You don’t really need to purchase a separate SWC obfuscator. And if you have a SWC obfuscator…

Click to continue reading “SWF Encrypt, SWC Encrypt, Do you need them both?”

Also posted in Flash Tagged , , , , , 14 Comments

ASV, UAE, ASR updates released… (2)

January 5, 2007 burakk

Another day, another update… How embarrassing! Nevertheless, this has happened before and we had to do what we had to do. We released updates, within 24 hours of the 5.20 updates, which fixes a single bug. Current versions of ASV, UAE and ASR are now 5.21…

This made me think why we don’t release updates more frequently… Obviously the reason is testing and quality assurance. This one bug was about having a one-too-many semicolon somewhere as a string constant – so it was an easy fix and required not much testing…

Speaking of updates, Ted Patrick’s post on Adobe Flex 2.01 update was quite enthusiastic…

Also posted in Flash, Flex Tagged , , Comments Off

ASV, UAE, ASR updates released…

January 4, 2007 burakk

As scheduled, we have released 5.20 versions of ASV, UAE and ASR. Only the decompile engine has been enhanced and fixed (apart from very minor changes to other parts), still changes are significant. (As usual license owners can download the updated versions at their assigned download URLs).

New versions bypass some new obfuscations older versions couldn’t (provided that correct AS import options are selected) but I know from experience that it won’t take obfuscator apps too long to get updated.

My recommendation to anyone who wants to protect his code is to use an obfuscator that renames identifiers, before any other type. Even if the code gets decompiled – and that happens sooner or later-, it would be extremely difficult to understand for others.

Also posted in Flash Tagged , , , , Comments Off

FLVMDI 2.94

January 1, 2007 burakk

We have released FLVMDI 2.94 early today, as scheduled.

The Register is known to be not always dead accurate but I think they were right on target with the post ‘Vista’s Suicide Bomb: who gets hurt?‘ and I loved reading ‘Windows DRM is the ‘longest suicide note in history’…

I think Ken Toley asks the right question about DRM: ‘how much security is too much’?…

Also posted in Flash Comments Off

Vista or Ubuntu?

October 15, 2006 burakk

I think the clear choice for the future is going with Ubuntu (a Linux distro) now.

For the near future (1-2 years), we have decided to keep XP as our main OS with Ubuntu installed in a separate partition. Nevertheless, we will purchase a Vista Ultimate license and install it on a test machine.

Unless Microsoft makes a sharp U-turn, which seems very unlikely, we plan to completely switch to a Linux variant (Ubuntu seems the best for now) after that few years (may be up to 5).

I think the time for Linux is coming. It hasn’t come yet, but I plan to be there when it does, so I just downloaded my first Linux OS yesterday.

I’m talking about our long term plans here. And my readers will know that I feel special about my ‘gut feeling’ about these kinds of issues. Only time will tell if I’m right again this time…

Switching to Macs is not an option for us with their inflated prices, along with many other reasons.

Microsoft has been going downhill for a while and so Vista will be the last MS OS we will be paying for and we don’t plan to use it extensively.

We are Windows only guys currently, and we sell licenses for our software for a living. None of us here can program for Linux (or Mac OSes). So, we will keep on doing what we know best but transform ourselves in time, slowly.

I don’t believe that software should be free (as in beer) and an ecosystem will flourish for the Linux world as the OS becomes mainstream, in which we will take our place.

I’ve been programming for MS Windows since Windows 3.0, I programmed for MS-DOS before that. I’m not saying I won’t touch MS Vista but I don’t see my future there with MS anymore…

10 Comments

ASV, UAE and ASR Updated

September 5, 2006 burakk

I usually don’t post about minor bug-fix updates to our software, but it turns out a significant amount of our customers simply forget to download the updates.

It’s trivial to have a ‘feature’ that checks for updates regularly, then download and update the software but ‘do not call home’ is our policy. In this spyware age, I still think it’s the only option we have.

We do have a menu command that says ‘check version’, opens the default browser with current version information passed on the URL, and the page shows if you are running the latest version or not. Apparently and expectedly this manual version checking is not enough for some of our users.

I do not intend to bloat my blog with insignificant product news, but until we find a better solution (have any ideas?), probably I’ll make posts like this every six months or so.

The news for our ASV, UAE and ASR customers is that we have a new version (5.15) available at their assigned download URLs. There are no new features, but lots of fixes. And, remember there’s a ‘Check Version’ command in the ‘help’ menu. Thanks…

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FLV Metadata Viewer Beta

August 26, 2006 burakk

We have just released beta of FLVMDV: Free, Windows XP property sheet extension that displays FLV info (like dimensions, codecs, duration) and also the contents of the embedded onMetaData event for FLV (Flash video) files.

Flvmdv

We also released FLVMDI 2.9 two days ago, which can now extract onMetaData event data as an XML file, but having the info in file properties dialog is sometimes more convenient.

Please let us know of any issues, suggestions.

Also posted in Captionate, Flash 5 Comments

ASV is 6 today

May 16, 2006 burakk

It’s been 6 years already?! We had our good times and bad times but what I remember most is hard work, and the joy of reading ‘thank you’ emails from happy customers…

We hoped to release the minor update we planned for ASV today, on its anniversary – but we weren’t able to do it. ‘Lets fix this too, it will take only a few hours’ were the evil words caused this. Anyway, it should only take a couple of days more…

Today, I thought about the past and the future, and realized this: We (Manitu Group) are small (We are only 4 people), and we will stay small. We will never make a few million dollars and be able to retire this way. Thank god we do not receive 100 orders a day, we won’t be able to cope with it. In the end, we are happy doing what we are doing and that’s all what really matters…

Though technically I’m the boss around here, being 4 people, we all feel like we don’t have any bosses – and that’s great. We are in Istanbul, Turkey, most of our customers are from the US – so we have a good excuse to wake up late and stay up until 4am. I usually arrive at the office at 2pm and that’s considered normal…

I’m 36 now, I’ve been programming since my mother brought home a Commodore VIC-20. You could easily get an out of memory error while typing a few pages of BASIC with it. (Later I bought myself a Sinclair ZX-81, it was worse in that respect). Now, my mobile phone has way better specs than the best computer I owned 15 years ago (It was a 386SX 16MHz with 2MB RAM and a 80MB harddisk, no sound card, no CD-ROM, multimedia PCs weren’t around then. It was my second PC), with the exception of the keyboard layout and screen size in inches…

So far, it’s been a fun journey. Thanks to ASV which allowed me to quit my day job where I had a boss and had to get up really early in the morning. Thanks to Macromedia (now Adobe) for making Flash… And, most importantly, thanks to our customers for their trust and continued support for a small software-house in Turkey.

It’s been 6 years already?! I guess time passes quickly when you are enjoying yourself…

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ASV 5 Now Available!

October 28, 2005 burakk

Action Script Viewer 5 is released. See http://www.flashdecompiler.com/index.php?showtopic=218 for more information.

Click to continue reading “ASV 5 Now Available!”

Also posted in Flash Tagged , , 1 Comment