Gareth Jones

Company: DCOMsoft
Product: SWF Protector 2
Price: From $39.95

Note: This review is for an outdated product. For a review of SWF Protector 3, see here.

About a week ago, DCOMsoft emailed me to ask if I’d be interested in trying out their SWF Protector 2 product and posting my thoughts in exchange for a licence. I’d like to stress that in no way does providing a license obtain a favourable review for any old product – I always approach a product objectively and will post both positive and negative findings whether the review is commissioned or not.

So, on with the review. On installing the application it came to time to register it. I copied and pasted in the serial and hit the Enter button without noticing that I hadn’t selected the serial number properly before copying and had missed off the last digit. The little registration window closed and gave me no feedback, so it wasn’t until I tried to run the application again and found that it wasn’t yet registered that I noticed that the registration had failed. I tried again, this time re-selecting the serial number and making sure I had it all in there, and it then gave me a message confirming registration. For instances where a mistake like this can happen, it would be worth having a message to say “Registration failed” or “Incomplete serial number”, but that’s a minor gripe.

Once registered, the application’s interface is very clean and quite minimalist. The first thing I noticed – and with some excitement – was an “Add folder recursively” button which, I’m pleased to say, works a treat. The application adds all of the SWFs contained within a parent and all child folders, tells you their protection status and offers the ability to open each one if you need to make sure you’re looking at the right file here.

As opposed to SWF Encrypt which shows you all the SWFs in a directory and asks you to select all of the ones you want to obfuscate, SWF Protector 2 assumes you’ll want to protect everything by giving you just one “Protect all” button. This makes sense, because if you didn’t want to protect your SWFs then chances are you wouldn’t be using the application in the first place. If there are any SWFs in there that you don’t want to protect however, you can simply remove them individually from the list before hitting the “Protect all” button. Alternatively, if you do only want to protect a single file, you can right-click on that file and select “Protect one file” from the menu.

Having had SWF Encrypt crash on me a few times after trying to obfuscate a file that was currently open inside the Flash IDE, I was curious to see what SWF Protector would do in this case. It didn’t disappoint, prompting me with a message stating that it could not overwrite the file – a much more elegant solution that simply crashing unexpectedly!

When my target file wasn’t open inside Flash’s IDE, SWF Protector 2 further impressed by renaming the original file “example_original.swf” and creating an obfuscated version with the original file’s name. This eliminates the issue I outlined in SWF Encrypt’s case where you either have to rename all your files manually or change all of your file links on your server to take into account the different name of the protected file. Bonus.

I also wanted to see what SWF Protector 2 did when revisiting a previous project – would it remember the last location or would I have to navigate to the project all over again? It actually remembered my previous location, and did so even when I closed the application without protecting any files. Excellent.

Also available at the top of the screen is an Advanced option which lets you configure the level of obfuscation – either on a per-class basis or you can set the level for the entire file. I took an unprotected SWF that was 518kb in size and ran it through the obfuscator at minimum settings and the output was also 518kb. I ran the same file again at maximum settings and this time the output came out at 555kb, so obviously the level of protection is such that it can make anywhere between 0% and 10% difference to the file-size – exactly how much protection you apply is up to you, so you can balance protection against file-size depending on the exact needs of your specific project. This is another feature that is missing from SWF Encrypt.

One bug that I did notice in SWF Protector 2 though was that after protecting a file in Advanced mode, the “Protect all” button would not become re-enabled for me to run another pass despite me selecting a new, unprotected file. To get the button back I either had to switch to Simple mode or restart the application and switch back to Advanced mode. This isn’t a deal-breaker, as you won’t be re-protecting files with different levels of security one after the other very often (if at all), and I only noticed it because of the test I was running. However, to get top marks an application does need to be bug-free, so I’ll have to take this and the failure to notify on a failed registration into account when coming up with a score.

The fact that SWF Protector 2 not only does what it says on the tin but does so with much more thought towards usability and thus efficiency of use does make it a better product than SWF Encrypt. I’m sure DCOMsoft will endeavour to resolve the two small issues I experienced with the application as soon as they read this post, whereas from past experience (here, here and here) I know that Amayeta is unlikely to even care about SWF Encrypt’s bugs, let alone fix them. Being a better product is one thing, but being a better product that costs only a third of Amayeta’s price (the personal license costs just £25, though you’ll probably want the business license at £39 to be able to use it commercially) is just great and easily makes it a recommended product.

8/10

Coming soon: A review of how these SWF protectors stack up against SWF decryption tools.

• Current project: About to tidy 2 months' worth of paper-work from my desk. :(