Saturday, March 24, 2012

DropSpot 1.2

I never got around to posting about the initial release of DropSpot, so I guess I'll just do that now.

If you don't know, DropSpot is an Android app I released recently to easily access and manipulate files on your Android device wirelessly, over wifi, using a modern web browser such as Google Chrome. The key feature of the app, and the reason I created it, is that you can drag-and-drop files from your native file explorer right onto the browser, and have it copy the files to your phone---you can even copy multiple files at once!

I'm posting today because I've released version 1.2 of the app onto the Market (Google Play). This is a relatively small update, but with some (I hope) welcome improvements. First, you can now download entire folders as a zip file. I know I was sometimes frustrated at only being able to download files one-at-a-time, so this should be very useful. Selecting individual files in a folder to download is a feature that I will definitely include at some point, but is not a part of this release.

Next, many users requested that they be able to access their removable SD cards and such. After some research, it seems that many device manufacturers have been including extra SD card slots in their devices---particularly tablets. This is troublesome, because even the most recent versions of the Android API only tell you where the "default" external storage is. Previously, DropSpot hid the internal stuff from you, and only showed you that "default" external drive. This was for convenience and simplicity, since most people don't care about the internals of their device. However, to access some of these alternative external drives, it was important to have that ability.

My compromise is that, by default, folders which cannot be read AND written to are hidden, and when you first open the web interface, it defaults to that "default" external drive. Please see the wiki for more details on finding your external drives.

Last, a handful of crashes reported have been fixed, as well as some web interface bugs. In particular, if your browser does not support the way DropSpot does uploads, it will properly let you know.

Links:
DropSpot Wiki
- DropSpot Google Play Listing ($1.99)
- DropSpot Lite Google Play Listing (Free)