Nektra Advanced Computing Blog

Nektra Advanced Computing is glad to announce that we are always working on Windows Live Mail API improvements from all your feedback. Now in our Windows Live Mail API Trial you are able to access the storage folders with read, write, delete, move, rename and clone capabilities. We are also able to append text and or HTML code inside each cloned message. Here is a screen shot of the Message Bodies in our WLMailApi C# Demo and below a video showing more capabilities of our product.

Contact us to ask any commercial question or use our forum for technical inquiries.

Today we have released a console for monitoring and spying on applications using Microsoft’s Component Object Model. This technology is used in many professional applications and now you are able to watch them in action too!

Deviare’s last integration is the ability to intercept COM interfaces. Using this technology and heuristics to discover this interfaces, the console lets you see which interfaces are being used by an application, and how they made their calls.

Here is an example monitoring the Windows Live Messenger:

As you have seen, we found the instantiation of IwebBrowser2. Since we don’t know what we want to see yet, we hooked every member except IDispatch (not necessary here). Then, the console printed calls for Navigate2 (among others), and we could see where the little browser at the bottom of messenger was getting its Adverts from.

The console is open source, so feel free to contribute on it. In this first release, it contains only one method to discover the creation of interfaces, but many others may be added. Go chase them .

Download Deviare COM Spy Console

YouTube is very popular. It can also be very useful for companies to promote their products.

It provides free hosting of your video and allows you to embed it on your website,  this keeps your companies bandwidth costs down.  YouTube also provides a social network for its users allowing videos to be commented on and voted for and promoted within YouTube itself!

When creating the videos for OEAPI, CookiePie, Deviare and SpyStudio. I did some research on how to make a High Quality video for YouTube but found no complete source on how to make it from scratch using free software.

I used the following software for making my videos.

CamStudio 2.0 too record my desktop. (GPL)
Audacity 1.3.5 too record audio for the video. (GPL)
Virtualdub 1.8.5 for cutting and encoding. (GPL)
G.I.M.P. 2.4 for creating a company logo to put at the start and end of my video. (GPL)
JPGAvi 1.07 for converting the jpg into an avi frame. (Free/Donateware)
XviD Codec for encoding the video. (GPL)
LAME for use of MP3 in Audacity. (LGPL)

The main problem with using YouTube for your video is that the default videos are 320 x 240 resolution, using the H.263 codec that was developed in 1995.  This provides a low quality blurry picture that makes it almost impossible to see what is going on.

YouTube have recently added an option to view their videos at an increased resolution.  This is at 480 x 360 and also comes in 2 different Codec formats H.264/MPEG-4 AVC with stereo AAC sound and the standard H.263 but in the higher resolution.

To make the videos:

CamStudio Full Screen

I used CamStudio to film the full desktop but i set the desktop size to a more viable 800×600 so it can be viewed easier on YouTube.

CamStudio Autopan

I also duplicated the recording by repeating the exact same things but this time using cam studios panning option i recorded an area of 320 x 240.

We then needed to convert these videos in something usable and manageable so we could edit them.  I did this by loading both videos into VirtualDub and changing them as follows.

For both recordings.

Video > Filter > Add > Resize

Then changed the Absolute (pixels) to 480 x 360 resolution.

VirtualDub Resize

The default frame rate from CamStudio is 200 fps which is unnecessary for what we need so i downgraded both videos to 30 fps.

Video > Frame Rate > Convert to fps

VirtualDub Framerate

Raw video editing requires a large amount of harddrive space.  To get around this without losing much video quality i also re-encoded the video into Mpeg4 format using the XviD Codec.

Video > Compression > XviD MPEG-4 Codec.

Xvid MPEG-4 Codec

Then to make the videos.

File > Save as AVI.

A start and end to the videos was needed.

I did this by placing the Nektra Logo on a 480 x 360 background and loading it into JPGAvi.

Nektra Logo

This outputs a small avi file that i then loaded into VirtualDub and changed the Resolution,  Framerate and encoding in the same way as above.

I then copy pasted the single frame until the start was 5 seconds long.

Now with all the videos ready for editing i started a new project in VirtualDub and appended the video i needed starting with the logo introduction.

File > Append AVI Segment

I went through both videos (closeup and full screen) selecting areas and exporting them to be imported into the final video.

Edit > Set selection start

Edit > Set selection end

This gave me the video i wanted which i could then use Audacity to record a voice over.  Exporting as a mp3 i can then use VirtualDub to place the audio track in the AVI.

Audio > Audio from other file

This video when uploaded to YouTube can then be embeded on your own website in both
Standard

and High Quality by adding &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to both urls in the embed code.

Cookiepie is one of the favorite Firefox extensions for web developers and users of webmail services like Google Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.Web developers use cookiepie to test their sites.In the past, if a site (e.g. home banking, community site) required extensive testing simulating many different users, the developer needed to open different browsers. Currently all browsers, including Firefox, have just one place to store cookies.Some users of webmail services have more than one web account to log into. People are using each web account for different purposes but they can’t login to the same site at the same time in the same browser.The Cookiepie Firefox Extension is a solution to this problem, as it allows users to log into different webmail accounts on separate tabs. Try it with two or more of your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts.This new release fixes problems experienced in Gmail 2.0, and supports many complex sites like the new Yahoo mail. Even webmail embedded chat is working now!We have made a short video so you can see it in action:

Cookiepie is Free Open Source Software under the GPLv2 license. You can install it now from Nektra Cookiepie site.Please, if you have comments leave them in our group here. We would particularly like to hear about your experience with other sites, such as Facebook. We are making a list of supported websites.