So, it’s been quite a while since the last post of this sort, and I did slow down on the projects mentioned there for some time, but…
… I’ve been focusing again on WPDLib and RandFill for the last couple of months and made progress:
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WPDLib is now at, what I randomly decided to call “version 0.4.0”. It does what it was set out to do1: Handle MTP devices (smartphones), copy files to it, delete content on it, etc. Considering I started it to support another project of mine (RandFill), it is now usable enough to incorporate it there as an “external dependency”.
By that, RandFill will then able to use Android smartphones and other WPD-compatible devices and not only USB sticks/normal mass-storage devices, as before.
Of course, I’m also way behind modern times in treating smartphones/MTP devices as media players for local content, since by now, the world has turned its collective head to online music streaming — but I have (and will continue to have) a nicely curated collection of local audio files that I listen to.
Short term, future improvements should mainly serve and support its now primary client (i.e. RandFill), but I have also ideas for more general changes, which will probably show up in the project’s test programs first.
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RandFill didn’t get any essential changes to its master branch in years, but I’m currently busily working on the development branch, replacing the old internal code (that handles only USB mass-storage-devices) with the interfaces to WPDLib, for example.
As of yesterday, I hit a milestone and reached feature parity with the old RandFill 1.x capabilties (more or less: a few minor things changed and/or had to go).
And yet, I’m hesitant to call it a v2-beta as of now, or to already merge it back to the master: I still need to fix a few things and optimize it before I could do that with a clear conscience.
That’s it for now; hopefully, the next update in this series will not take as long as this one… 😉
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Mostly or most of the times. And the 2-3 times I encountered very weird behavior, I could track it down (sometimes after long troubleshooting sessions) to old devices (Android 4.x) or maybe not fully WPD-compliant support or implementations on the device.
But to figure that out the first time was a pain. It also does not help that not much is written about WPD: I can’t really judge on much WPD is used nowadays, but the amount of (current) documentation, sample code, blog posts or forum discussions it rather slim; despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to be superseded by the next hot thing (as so often in IT). But I guess with all the people using wireless connection technologies and cloud-based platforms, it’s not much in demand… ↩︎
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