Fudge turns 2

By Daniel Cook

It’s hard to believe Fudge is now 2 years old now! This post is a quick write-up on what has been done in the past year, and what’s ahead. If you’re not familiar, Fudge is an alternative pairing app for Fujifilm cameras. See the previous write-up to learn more.

0.2.0 Release

0.2.0 brought a lot of new features and improvements:

A clone of X Raw Studio (that runs on Linux!)

The biggest blocker previously for writing an alternative to X Raw Studio client was the fact that Fujifilm’s profile format was completely undocumented. Using vcam black-box reverse-engineering and Virtualbox, I was able to reverse this format in just a few hours.

I used this to create a crude desktop app, which could serve as the foundations for a more complete X Raw Studio replacement.

Rewriting the frontend

The current UI is written in Android’s classic views and XML system. This framework is aging, and will only get slower over time. That and the fact the current frontend is a state management mess tells me that it’s time to start looking at more modern options. My current choice is Jetpack Compose. You can read more about the frontend rewrite here.

Into the future

After the frontend is rewritten and stable, the next thing to focus on is bluetooth. A lot of great work on reversing Fuji bluetooth has been done by gkoh which means you already have a great third-party open-source option for pairing with your camera.

But a third-party open-source app would also be nice to have, wouldn’t it?

As for how this will work, when it will happen, if it will happen, or how well it will work. No idea. But it’s something to think about!

But here’s one way it could happen: with the way Fuji cameras ‘hand off’ camera control from bluetooth to WiFi, it would be possible for this effort to take place in a completely separate app that can simply launch Fudge telling it to connect to the camera’s WiFi AP. This could have the added benefit of being a project in a different language or framework that could work at a faster or slower pace relative to Fudge.

Next: Stay tuned for possibly another update in the fujihacking world… July 10th?