BrailliantConnect: your Brailliant in the Finder, no macFUSE

BrailliantConnect 1.0.0 is out — free, open source, and finished. Plug a Brailliant in and it appears in the Finder. Unplug it and it goes away. No macFUSE, no kernel extension, nothing to start by hand.

I wrote it because I needed it. I use a BI 40X with a screen reader every day, and getting a file onto it from a Mac had stopped being possible in any way I was willing to live with.

What it does

• The display appears as ~/Brailliant in your home folder.
• One folder per storage — the display's own memory, and a USB stick plugged into the display when there is one. Both at once: the stick is no longer invisible.
• Read and write. Copy files in and out with the Finder, or with anything else that uses the file system.
• A menu bar item says whether the display is there, and tells you when a copy is still running.

Installing

Unpack, drag into Applications, open it once. That is the whole procedure. It is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens with no Gatekeeper warning. macOS 11 or later, Intel and Apple Silicon.

One setting, on the display

File transfer (MTP) has to be on. It has been on by default since version 2.5 of the display's software, so it probably already is. Otherwise: Options, User settings, MTP.

Nothing is switched off by this. Your display publishes its braille interfaces and the file-transfer one at the same time, and stays usable as a braille terminal while files are copying.

What it does not do

• The Finder returns before a copy is finished. Three gigabytes come back instantly and keep going for about seven minutes. The menu bar says so while it lasts, and notifies you when it lands — do not unplug in between.
• Changes made on the display itself go unnoticed until the folder is read again. MTP announces nothing.
• One connection at a time, which only matters if you also use the command-line tool that ships inside the app.

Only one model has been tested

I have a BI 40X, and that is what this was built on. Nothing in the code is tied to a model, but nothing proves the others work either. If you have a BI 20X, a BI 40, or anything else in the family, running brailliant doctor and pasting the output here would settle it — that is the one thing I cannot do alone.

Download

Download BrailliantConnect 1.0.0 from GitHub

The source is there too, under the MIT licence. Everything the app says is written to be read in braille: one fact per line, and no state carried by colour or by an icon alone.