Friday, November 13, 2015

New APK Studio Version (d49d3de), Native Installers For Windows & Linux

[EDITED]

I have been trying real hard to keep the APK Studio project active. Solving issues, adding missing features as soon I notice.

I am excited to announce new beta release, i.e., d49d3de available for download.

With this release, now you get a couple Toolbars, one at bottom & one at left. These toolbars have icons which allow you toggle visible/invisible views (Project, Console etc.). Also as an enhancement to build process, APK Studio's versioning now uses Git tags.

In result to which APK Studio now looks more like a professional IDE (which it may become someday).

One more of the few good things that have happened in the while is I have been able to get a free license for InstallBuilder donated by BitRock. Tried & tested, it is way too powerful program for creating native, cross platform installers for any kind of application and barely adds anything noticeable to final package size. Thanks to the software, I am able to produce all-in-one installers for APK Studio to be run on Linux x86/x86_64 & Windows.

These installers automatically install APK Studio along with vendor binaries, add Desktop/Start Menu shortcuts, create Uninstaller & more.

You can download the Linux (x86 & x86_64) installer from this and this link, Windows installer from this link. Source code for this release is available here.

Sunday, November 1, 2015

eToolkit - Open-source Client-side Password Generation, Hash & More

eToolkit is an online toolkit to perform common confidential tasks I use to do on a regular basis including Generating Random Passwords, Base64 decoding & encoding, Text Hashing using MD5/SHA-1/SHA-224/SHA-256/SHA-512 algorithms, Character Counting and things.
I admit there are various tools available online for the purpose and undoubtedly I have been using them. Even more, major functions of eToolkit are inspired if not powered by them. But I did not like the idea of submitting confidential content to a website or application which is not open for review.
For most random websites those they appear in google search, following concerns arise in my mind whenever I am using their services:
  • The password I am generating might be stored on their server
  • The text I am hashing might be saved in rainbow tables for reverse-lookups
  • I do not want to reload a page just to Base64 encode or decode a word. That feels creepy
For addressing all those concerns and try to solve the most, I made this tiny-little angular powered web-app that does all of those in your browser (doesn't send a thing to server) and open-sourced it here on Github because this how things I wanted these tools to be. Open!
To become useful, eToolkit is grateful to below open-source projects which power it: