M10 Tools is going Open Source, help needed

Hey guys,

Some more bad news, but some good news to.

Bad news first, Flemmard decided finally, that he hasn't got enough time anymore to support and develop M10Tools fulltime. That means, he is quitting the main development. This is very unfortunate because Flemmard and I are the only two people who actually know how to reverse engineere the *.m10 format.

Therefore we are searching a new developer now, who can take Flemmard's part over. And here comes the good news: The next version is going to be OpenSource (most likely some kind of GPL). (This doesn't include the upcoming Virtuous Ten Studio, only the decoder/encoder for the m10 files itself).

Now let's get to the actual search. The requirements are quite hard. We search (Flemmard will be still here as some kind of help) one or two very experience C# or C++ developers with the following requirements:

  • Very good experience in C# and/or C++
  • Windows dev of course
  • Experience with reading/writing binary data would be helpful
  • Experience with reverse engineering file formats would be also helpful
  • Good spoken english required (German would be nice too)
  • Communication is done via either IRC or Skype Development uses SVN, so knowledge about SVN and how it works is quite helpful
  • Having a HTC phone with a sense 3.0/3.5 ROM is strongly advised. You don't totally need it, but it helps a lot

Now lets come to the tasks that needs to be done and the usual workflow

  • We do know everything important about the m10 file format, so the hard work is already done
  • But you still WILL be starring at your hexeditor four hours (no joke here), so if you don't like digging through hexcodes you are totally wrong here
  • This is not a halftime job. Writing such a decider/encoder requires quite a bit of spare time.
  • Once I explained you most of the things we know about m10 formats, YOU will start writing a parser for those files. This is much trial and error.
  • The time will come where you understand the basics of the format. Then you need to finish that decoder/encoder and start working on the addtional things (mainly image decoding/encoding).
  • Image decoding: The images saved in m10 have different special file formats. We do know how to decode them. There is just ONE format that needs further research.
  • One last thing: Flemmard won't give out his current source code. We have to accept that.

Diamondback has requested that anyone who is interested should reply in his thread on XDA

Flemmard and Diamondback had a great time developing this tool, so Diamondback is looking forward to working with new developers.

2 Comments:

Petteri said...

"One last thing: Flemmard won't give out his current source code. We have to accept that."

I wonder why is that.

Nick C. said...

It's alright, we still love you Flemmard! Hope you find a worthy replacement Diamondback!

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