Let’s talk about what’s been happening since my first post about MetaDiver. I’ve been excited to see the views to the blog since the MetaDiver post and that has me feeling there could be a lot of interest in this project.
Headache’s w/PDF
I’ve been been putting a lot of testing and research into Shell32’s PDF handling. Unfortunately I found that Ad*b* reader’s pdfshell.dll is broken or unreliable on 64 bit OS. I know it worked on my two computers until recently so something has changed. I’ve tried every scenario I could find or think of to no avail to make the 32bit dll work properly with Shell… My takeaway is it’s clear that we can’t depend on Ad*b*’s dll with Shell32. To avoid this issue altogether I’m pulling the PDF meta-data outside Shell. Below you can see the meta-data I am able to pull so far. Not bad!
For those that would like to see PDF details in Shell and Property->Details in Explorer there is a solid product available. It’s trial-ware with a $40 cost to purchase after 30 days. If you are cool with that then go that route, it works very well. It’s called PDF-ShellTools you can find it here.
Here’s the project status so far!
Going Forward
I may only provide the Shell version for free and a Pro version with all the extra work included as a 30 day time based Beta. This is evolving and ongoing so we will see. I want to make sure that the base version of MetaDiver is very functional, reliable and add’s value to many people and organizations while remaining simple and strait forward.
Here’s where it’s at
Working on Website and Wiki for MetaDiver. <-- Domain and hosting package purchased
Working on Exception logging so I can give you a Manifest success and failures. <-- ETA is Soon
Working on Bug squashing and speed improvements. <-- ETA is on going.
Working on Exif GPS parsing and decoding using.
Requested – XML output.
Ability to specify a matter name for organizing information. <-- ETA is Soon
Other features that may or may not be part of a buy up/donate version
Working on Testing PDF handling with library outside shell. <-- ETA is Soon
Database support via ODBC and/or SQLite/OLEDB database table
Other file formats.
Requested – Profile‘s allowing you to only pull the Field Column’s you want.
Column reordering.
Requested – Windows placement memory.
Wrapping up
As you can see a lot is going on. For those interested in a super duper MetaDiver version stay tuned!
New Beta this Friday.
Keep coding