Wish Automatically name IP numbers with phone model in the IDE

[Sandman]

I just got a second phone to try my app on, and as I added the new IP number to the IDE it instantly got a little bit confusing. ("Which mobile am I connected to at the moment?") I imagine this will only get worse once I get around to getting a fistful of old mobiles to test on.

It seems the mobiles have some sort of self-awareness, so they know what model they are. (As one can see when going into the settings and looking at the About mobile screen.

I propose

• That in the submenu with the IP numbers, the IP is suffixed with " (<model name>)"
• In the bottom of the IDE window, the text "Connected" is suffixed as above

Example, as it currently is displayed in the Connect submenu:

New IP
----------
192.168.1.32
192.168.1.6
192.168.1.118​

...would instead be...

New IP
----------
192.168.1.32 (Nexus 5X)
192.168.1.6 (Moto X)
192.168.1.118 (Nexus 7)​

(Obviously it's possible to imagine a solution where this is an editable field instead, either in the IDE or in the B4A-Bridge app. That would work nicely also, I just thought this proposal was a decent match between making phones identifiable and not really requiring the coder to do any extra work.)

 

[Erel]

I guess that the auto discovery is not working properly in your network. The name should be listed automatically:

 

[Sandman]

Huh, I guess it doesn't... But I still have this, so I wonder what's up with the discovery.

Can you say how your auto discovery works so I have somewhere to start investigating?

(Yes, I like functional computer names. )

 

[Erel]

It sends UDP messages to the broadcast address. Are you running the latest version of B4A-Bridge?

 

[Sandman]

Yep, I sure am. And I did a quick test from my main workstation to my server:

sandman@asus:~$ echo "woop woop" | nc -u -q1 server 15000

Which the server received nicely. So the name resolution works nicely here, and the message is received:

sandman@server:~$ nc -l -u 15000
woop woop

(Not sure if it's relevant, but I'm using a real laptop running W10 for B4X development, so not a VM or anything like that. And I'm using an Asus RT-AC66U for router, which is updated to latest firmware and I haven't really changed anything in it other than set up the wifi and wan settings. Also, I was unable to find anything relating to routing UDP packets in it.)

 

[Sandman]

I realized I should also try that with the broadcast address:

sandman@asus:~$ echo "woop woop" | nc -b -u -q1 192.168.1.255 15000

And it didn't work. Googling for the topic at least suggests that there might be some issues with my router when it comes to broadcast messages. Let's drop this Erel, I'll figure it out some other time.