WARNING! this is BETA code, if you don't know much about windows shares (CIFS or samba) or internetworking or that sort of stuff I would highly recommend you not installing this yet. If none of that scares you then go to the Android Market and install Vincent, hopefully the info below will be helpful.

The Black Hole

Currently in early beta stage. The first working prototype of a manual CIFs slurper is done (called Vincent). Vincent will, given the details of a CIFs share copy down all the files onto the SD card of an Android device.

I completely take to heart the ethos of "Release Early, Release Often" and so this application is FAR from finished, if you don't like experimental software then please do NOT install or play with this. If you are a developer and want to play around and see what is possible I'm hear and listening :)

Vincent

• note be sure and get the jcifs library from http://jcifs.samba.org/ if you checkout the source

I personally already use Vincent daily. This app syncs my Music and my Photos from my desktop to my phone. When I add new music to iTunes or photos to picasa they will automagically be picked up by Vincent the next time I run him. The next feature I'll be adding is home network detection, so that when I enter home Vincent will start syncing and will do so periodically while the home network is available, keeping my SD card up to date with my latest music and photos. I do this using some simple cron scripts to create a symlink tree of the files I want to sync to my Android phone and then use Samba to share that tree to my local network. I will add more detailed instructions shortly, in the mean time here are some screen shots of me syncing some photos from a server (I'm actually copying xmas photos from my colo server in a different country):

here is my home screen where I run Vincent	This is the setup screen, it should be fairly intuitive, I've blocked out my server name for obvious reasons. Fill in your own username, password, server IP or hostname, share name, directory within the share and finally where under /sdcard/ you want to copy to. Vincent will never overwrite files on the SD card.

Now click start, if all the details are correct the copy will begin but to see it you need to check the notification bar. There you will see errors and progress	remember this is beta software. I have tested against Vista shares, OSX windows shares and Linux samba and all have worked for me, but please do let me know if you have problems with other versions of cifs Please dont get upset if it doesn't work for you, instead log an issue and I'll try my best to help out. You can see Vincent is busy copying files in the notification bar here, so drag it down to see more detail...
and here you can see the progress bars. Top bar is the current file, bottom is number of files still remaining to be copied

if you back out of the application, or press the stop button Vincent will finish at the end of the file he is already copying, because I don't want to leave any half files behind and I don't want Vincent to ever delete a file (at least not in this beta version). So when you press stop it might seem like nothing is happening and Vincent ignored you, but don't fear he will stop at the end of what he is doing.

I hope this early beta release is useful to people, if not perhaps the enhancements I have planned will be :)

Cheers, Scott.