I recently learned about LocalSend and was intrigued by how it functioned by only using the WiFi network of the devices. I did not know my LAN had these capabilities.
Now that I’ve learned about it, I am excited to know if there is anything else I can do with it. Perhaps there could be a way to send prank notifications to all the connected devices, create a private chat room, or have custom LAN parties.
I genuinely do not know anything about how WiFi or LAN in general works in this matter. Is it possible for me to build my own applications that make use of these features? If so, I would love to get a direction on what resources or guides I should be looking for. If not, I would still be happy to use similar pre-built applications.
Congrats on dipping your toes into networking! Don’t let it suck you in too much or you’ll end up with a career change.
Plenty of resources out there to learn from, just pick a project and try to implement it. Or just play around with netcat (just ‘nc’ nowadays).
Look into the TCP/IP stack (or the OSI model, both cover the core concepts) for an overview of how applications talk to each other. This will also help you understand how LocalSend probably works (my guess is broadcasting to your network and seeing what devices are listening on a certain port. Some LAN-enabled games work like this, others aren’t as magical and ask you to provide an address and a port).