Technology, Software, Brews, and Opinions

Today I watched a MokaFive demo.  Its like a VM, but with separate-able profiles, similar to AppV.  It leverages the local hardware for the VM, uses incremental updating for version changes, and has some nice policy features.

[Devil's Advocate=1]

The “trial” is useless.  It’s operated by the MokaFive team, using their environment, which means you don’t get to join a MokaFive VM to an ActiveDirectory domain, and you can’t get AppV installed at that point.  Their Windows 7 image is the trial (see 30-day) edition, so there are more problems with just that hurdle.

The suggestion of using the Adobe Creative Suite is useless, as the great and mighty Adobe states that any time you put a CS product in a virtualized environment, support is then void as this violates the license.

On a different scale, the Autodesk products CAN be used in a VM, however we have learned from that mistake, and a local installation results in a smoother utilization of the software.

Good ideas, some centralized management, but you’re still running a local VM on a local machine.  Unless you use a USB drive deployment for the VMs, there is very limited mobility (“cloud”) in this product.

MokaFive is basically VMware Player/Fusion with a shimmy and a shake.

[Devil's Advocate=0]

I’ve gotten around to looking at the Autodesk Master Suite 2012 box that’s on my desk (it’s a folder of 32 disks). The deployment creator is now completely re-vamped, but not quite as visually appealing on the option editor. At least this time, they gave me the option to NOT install Design Review for the Architecture package.

They did something additional that makes it nicer: They ask for the license and/or server information by default. No need to go into the configuration options to put this in.

Downside: I have to reopen and re-configure for every deployment type (x86 and x64), and it doesn’t remember what I used in the previous package.

Time for another App Scorn entry.  This time, we have Techsmith Snagit to put the evil eye on.

Originally, Snagit ran perfectly under Windows XP and AppV.

For particular reasons (unbeknown to myself), Snagit has a big problem with AppV and Windows 7, when combined together.  Snagpriv.exe is the culprit, needing something that we’re not sure of.  When packaged, and used on a Windows 7 machine, under AppV, it results in an error message “Unable to start snagpriv.exe”.  No bug code, no definitive error message.

On the Techsmith support page, it claims that this can happen if you have ZoneAlarm installed, and you need to configure it to allow snagpriv to run.  In our case, that claim is bogus.

So after some searching, I found myself looking at a completely different error code, from the AppV client instead of Snagit.  It seems that there is an extra bit of code you can insert into the AppV OSD file to make Snagit work (and just about anything else that might have similar issues).

<ENVLIST>
     <ENVIRONMENT VARIABLE="__COMPAT_LAYER">RunAsInvoker</ENVIRONMENT>
</ENVLIST>

Of all the years I have been working with Softgrid/AppV, I never knew this code existed.  Now I do, and Snagit works without a hindrance.

Just as a note, even though the great and mighty Adobe promised a Reverse command in Soundbooth for the CS4 release (and didn’t make it), they have also overlooked the command for the CS5 release. I brought the audio clip I wanted into Adobe Premiere, and was able to reverse the audio just fine.

As another note, Audacity, a free, open-source software, has the same command function, and has had it from the start.

And I added a new category to my blog: App Scorn.  Where software lacks in promised functionality, I will post!