From the “why bother?” department, I’ve created a little app that converts between ASCII text and BitmapData.
Here is a sample .bmp file that I took a screenshot of and imported into my FLA’s library.
Now it may look like a miniature Magic Eye, but it does actually have a message hidden in it. To read the message you need the salt which is used in the conversion of ASCII to hex colours, and of course this little Flash 8 app.
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Click here to open the app. I’m not sure what to do with source at the moment, possibly submit it for approval to the fantastic IFBIN service if anyone finds this useful and I find time to comment the code fully to bring it up to IFBIN standards.
Also, the reason I put the word Encryption in quotes like that was because a statistical analysis on the bitmap would probably crack any image (of sufficient length) in milliseconds. But the algorithm (which at the moment is a simple multiplication and addition), could be made a lot more complex to prevent this to a certain extent.
Some things to try:
- Reduce the number of letters in the salt to reduce the colour range in the image.
- Use a few upper-case OR lower-case in the salt to alter the hue of the image.
- Paste in your favourite poem and see what a pretty picture it makes 🙂
- Adapt the source to allow sharing of bitmap messages via remoting / FCS.