dinsdag 24 september 2013

AIR Application generates virus false positive

Today I was startled to see that a Virus had been found in a program I created myself.
It was the presentation I made for my fathers wedding. I had conveniently put it in a AIR presentation, to be able to install it on a random computer attached to a beamer.


Just to translate this message: it says that my file (installation_presentation_16x9.exe has been infected and that another program tried to access it. The process that tried to access it was explorer.exe
So probalbly my son, who was using the computer at the time accidentally hit the installation icon when he was looking for minecraft.
Explorer tried to start the installation procedure and was interupted by the virus-scanner.

Now what worries me is NOT that I might have a virus. As stated, I created the AIR file myself via FLASH, using only program-code I wrote myself and resources (photo's and sound) that I own or shot myself. None of these reources sparked the interest of the virus-scanner. Ofcourse there might be a virus in AIR itself, but I think that's rather unlikely.

More probable is that the viruschecker saw AIR as a form of polymorphic malware and generated a false positive. Possibly someone has once used AIR to create malware and this led to the false positive, as the AIR installer is indeed a form of polymorphic code, but not per se polymorphic malware.

I am worried however, that future programs created in AIR might generate the same respons from this virus-scanner.
I was planning on charging people for software (games) written by me packaged in an AIR installer.
If this is the user experience I can expect, I fear for the succes of this endeavor even before I have begun..

Has anyone got information that might put this fear to rest?

Sinterklaas journaal games

For the Dutch site Sinterklaasjournaal, I'll be creating 7 pure HTML 5 games in the next 6 weeks.
So my deadline is somewhere around 30th of octobre.

The games need to be scalable (lineair like Flash) and respond to touch. On the Ipad sound will be just a music. On all other devices sound will be implemented.
I will create a preloader, splashpage and game per game.
Some games will have levels.

This may seem like a gargantuan task, but I have the benefit of having made many a flash game, even in the time when this wasn't easy. AS1 was buggy as hell and there was no real way to debug it.
Even so, I made a game in a couple of days in as3.

Now I face the same kind of technical difficulties: Dom-sprites are fine, but if you have to scale them lineairly aswell, you cannot use the background property,because background scaling is not supported in all browsers.
So I'll use a div and another clipping div as sprites.
This will give me very limited performance, so where ever possible, I'll not use spritesheets at all.

Primitive, but the result should work just about anywhere, because I'll use only div, overflow hidden, top and left.. I use Jquery to navigate around the DOM (and for little else).

I'll be posting examples and general findings here, in the coming six weeks or if I really don't have the time to post, later after I'm finished.

For now, my finding is that with this technique my Phone (HTC Desire, with Android 2.2.2) is the bottleneck performance wise. But I have succesfully had 20 moving sprites, depthsorted live at 25 fps, with multitouch enabled, this gives me hope.