Sometimes, you don’t know exactly how to get inspired. Last week, as I was traveling back from a customer event, I started developing an useless but funny AIR 2.0 application for MAC users. First, I’ve been inspired by the Flash experiments of this French expert: http://grgrdvrt.com/blog/. Then I started looking for a way to screen capture my desktop and figured out that there’s an executable file “screencapture” installed by default on MAC OS X. Passing the “-x” parameter launches a silent screen capture. The last source of inspiration is the 90′s virus I used to admire and try to code while I was an EPITA student. Here’s a famous one that disturbed some Windows users.

Now it’s time for me to unveil my useless application. This is potentially the first virus ever developed for Adobe AIR We can assign it to the “Worms” virus family. Of course, this is just for fun. There’s no risk, this is just launching a visual effect.

Here is the link to the DMG application (as I use the Native Process API, I must package my AIR app as a DMG):
http://www.riagora.com/pvt_content/virus/AirWorms.dmg

And if you want to check the source… I must apologize, my code is very very messy in this project… and I had to use funny timers to avoid the progress bar and a weird blank screen behavior… But, if you want to see how it works: http://www.riagora.com/pvt_content/virus/perlin.zip

AIRworms, adobe AIR application with worms for RIAgora.com from michael chaize on Vimeo.

If someone wants to build a Windows version finding a way to silently screen capture the desktop, feel free to download my code and update it. Now, get infected !