hello goodbye

So not too long ago I was helping out my good friend at work investigate this chat/photosharing application called Hello. It is a chat program, but a really basic one with not too many features. However the cool thing about it is that you can trade pictures with other users very easily, and adds comments and point things out at what the other user is looking at. This is not what interested us though. It seemed there were hidden features to be found, such as if you typed certain words they would be auto-expanded in the chat or create animations in the photo window. She did an excellent job of explaining on her blog =), so I won't repeat. We eventually went a little further though. While investigating the code in a hex editor (geeks past this point only, thanks) I found the references to the animation pictures (and the keywords to create them). Looks like they are stored in a file in the "Hello\runtime" directory called "motio.psd". Hmmm, sounds like a Photoshop file to me. Alas, it was! And the reference names were to the names of the different layers on the photoshop image where each animation is stored. So as you can see on the image below, we messed around with this a bit and traded modified files. You can easily change the picture on each layer to however you want, save the file (using the latest photoshop version) and restart Hello to see new animations. Obviously it only works for the computer you are on, if you want your friends to see them too, you have to send them your modified file and have them copy it to the proper location. Unfortuantly to add new keywords would be difficult, have to wait for a new version with pluggable keywords (yeah right). We were able to modify the .exe file a bit through the hex editor though, and change keywords or the expanded versions a bit (if they were the exact same length) with... some good and some bad results :D