AV News 174 - November 2008
Special thanks to:
All the young people who entered, the hard working judges, all the loyal
Wessex Team - couldn't have done it without you, Ian Bateman for his talk
and creating the IRIS-25 opening sequence, Rodney Deval, our treasurer
and of course, the Trowbridge Trojans Tea Team.
Last but certainly not least, Stuart Blake, Dr Barry Senior Hon FRPS and the
RPS for the Special Projects Fund.
Igor Kokarev Speaking at IRIS-25
John Smith APAGB CPAGB
Igor on his first visit to Great Britain and first outside Russia commenced his talk
by giving a potted history of the company.
In 1998 he was at College in Kirov studying English and
Computer Sciences and with friends, enjoyed spending
time on his computer writing programs. At this time he
developed his first program, WinNavigator which was a
good replacement for Windows Explorer. Besides all the
usual file management, in addition, it contained a built in
image viewer.
In 1999 digital photography was in its infancy and it was
suggested that maybe he could write a program so that
he and his friends could exchange pictures and view them
as a picture show.
This he did and PicturesToExe was born. He published the program on his
own website and within two hours he had made his first sale!
The first version was very primitive - it had no transitions or sound but by the
second version, these had both been added. He then teamed up with his old
friend Aleksey Elin (who had already helped with advice and writing of some parts
of code for WinNavigator) and the following year the fade effect was added.
Aleksey, a very talented programmer, spent a great deal of his time developing
further transitions and objects and then writing the most difficult mathematical
algorithms. Five years ago Sergey Malychev joined the team to work on the
music player and later VideoBuilder for the burning of DVD video discs.
They work full time in a registered office in Kirov, which is some 936 km to the
North East of Moscow - he pointed out that Russia is a vast country and to cross
it by train from West to East would take eight days!!
There are now twelve people on the staff - all programmers with Igor as the
main developer and Aleksey working almost exclusively on PicturesToExe. Two
of the programmers are currently working on the development of a Mac version
of the program and last autumn Olga Suslova, a technical author joined the
company to produce a comprehensive user guide.
If someone discovers a problem and contacts the company it is first looked at
by a beta tester…but if it is an unusual one then Igor likes to keep his hand in and
help to sort the problem out.
A lot of the development work would not have taken place without the
suggestions from the people on the forum. It is the people who are presently
using it that come up with the best product development suggestions and he
made a point of publicly thanking all those people for their ideas, help and support.
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