ExpanDrive

In January of 2009, Magnetk LLC reincorporated as ExpanDrive, Inc. While we liked our unpronounceable, vaguely memorable, certainly misspelled moniker – it was time rebrand around a better name that better reflects the direction we’re headed.

It will be a little while longer before ExpanDrive for Windows supports more than just SFTP and achieves parity with ExpanDrive for Mac, but we’re committed to co-developing these two products, and at some point, releasing a Linux version.

Today we’re releasing version 1.8.2 – the first major revision in about a year. Full release notes can be found here. We apologize for how long it took to make this revision – our development on ExpanDrive for Windows was slowed while we got our Mac client out the door. However, as 2009 progresses, we aim to consolidate the two products further and work towards feature parity. We’re not going to announce a timeline for the work, but it certainly is a top priority.

Version 1.8.2 adds many important features and fixes

• Renamed SftpDrive to ExpanDrive for Windows
• Fixed major issue where Windows Explorer would sometimes crash while SftpDrive was loaded
• Dramatically improved performance of interaction+save with all MS Office Applications
• Support for Window 7 and Vista 64
• Fixed major bug where some applications, notably Emacs, would suspect a file had been modified on disk, but hadn’t
• Updated licensing to match ExpanDrive for Mac
• Update Network Provider component for much better interaction with environments with DFS
• Many performance and stability improvements
• Fixed issue where some licenses would not correctly get installed

Dan Frakes over at Macworld put up a review of ExpanDrive 1.3.1 bestowing us with 4 mice.

for seamless integration with the Finder—and ease of use—it’s tough to beat. It’s what the Finder’s built-in FTP/SFTP support should have been from the start.

A nice milestone for any Mac developer – to finally earn your mice.

This bug-fix release is now available on the auto updater and the ExpanDrive website. As always, release notes are here.

If you’re using an RSS reader you can subscribe directly to our release feed or our our beta release feed

ExpanDrive 1.2.10 is out and available via the auto updater. This is a bug fix release, addressing a few important issues reported by our users over at our customer support site at Get Satisfaction. If you’re having no issues, you can pass on this upgrade. For more info check the release notes.

ExpanDrive 1.2.9 is out now and available for download [release notes]. There are three major features of this release, apart from a host of small bug fixes and tweaks that we’ve put in the program in response to user input. New icons, MacFUSE 1.7, and new packaging/installation.

Long overdue, ExpanDrive has a new application icon and menu bar icon. They’re pretty hot. Many thanks to Jordan Langille over at OneToad Design who tirelessly worked with us through quite a number of revisions.

The second major change to ExpanDrive 1.2.9 comes with the addition of MacFUSE 1.7 [see CHANGELOG]. This removes a variety of small incompatabilities and addresses some major issues with certain applications saving after upgrading to OS X 10.5.3.

Again, long overdue – we’ve performed a complete overhaul of our installation technique. We’ve ditched of a PackageMaker in favor of a simple ZIP based distribution. MacFUSE will be magically installed or upgraded [with your permission] upon launch.

We’re doing it again! Become a fan of ExpanDrive on FaceBook and get access to a $5 off coupon good for ExpanDrive for Mac or SftpDrive for Windows

ExpanDrive’s FaceBook page

So Greenpeace dropped their annual list of environmentally unfriendly tech firms yesterday, and once again, through calculated data manipulation complete coincidence, a successful, fashionable and approachably-branded company is bringing up the rear. Nice work, Greenpeace. Way to contribute to the credibility of environmentalists.

Anyway, all this talk of eco-friendly technology got me thinking that, as far as greeness goes, Magnetk must be up there with the best in the world. After all, there are only three employees at the office, and not one of them drives to work.

Jeff usually bikes or takes the commuter rail, even though we all know from his Twitter feed that the stations frequently smell like pee. And Jon cycle-commutes with such intensity that cars are often forced from the road because of it.

While the office may not be LEED Platinum certified, it’s still in a converted Victorian; with all the impacts and emissions associated with demolition and construction, modifying an old structure is usually less harmful than building a new one.

Also, having windows that actually open means that on all but the hottest days, climate control can be achieved without switching on the small window AC unit (or “entropy pump”, as Jon likes to call it).

Furthermore, the company is bootstrapped—the guys that own it built it with their own cash. That means no unpleasant uber-capitalists are cranking carbon-besotted dollars into your seamless SFTP integration. And because there’s no physical product, packaging, or shipping, the environmental costs of production are all but nonexistant.

Even the office location screams Earth-friendly: it’s in one of the most bikeable cities in America, and everything from the train to the subway to locally-brewed beer to sushi to the best burritos in town is well within a five-minute walk.

If the employees were feeling unusually lazy one day, it’s still not a crisis; any number of local establishments deliver by bike. There’s no need even to step out for a cup of coffee, thanks to an office bottomless cup card from the coffee shop downstairs.

So are there greener companies out there? Probably—people are way into that sort of thing these days. But they tend both to work way too hard at it, and to shove it in your face once they’ve achieved results.

Magnetk’s greeness is elegant and serendipitous, and if I hadn’t written this blog post, no one at the company ever would have bothered to tell you about it.

A few weeks ago at WWDC I did a short on camera interview with with Brett Terpstra from The Unofficial Apple Weblog as part of their interview series with indie Mac developers. We chat for a little bit about ExpanDrive: why it’s cool, and where we plan to go with the software (S3/Flickr support?). Check out the video over at TUAW.

Names changed to protect the embarrassed.

Bjørndalen: So, as the ice melts does that dilute the rest of the coffee?
Maarten: Well, yeah. It’s not like the ice water knows how to stay separated from the coffee water.
Bjørndalen: I know that. I was trying to think of a nice way to ask if it insulted your manliness to drink watered down coffee.
Maarten: shrugs

Later

Bjørndalen: We should get a couple MacBook chargers to put over near the couch. It’s one of those things where you don’t really need to spend $150 on it but…
Rinaldo: interrupting I mean, these things get like 4 hours of battery life.
Maarten: Yeah, how long are you planning on working on the couch at a time?
Bjørndalen: OK. I’m sorry. I totally forgot that these things have batteries.

Along with making awesome software, we strive to provide the highest quality support to all of our customers. From the beginning, we’ve done 100% developer based support. We, the developers, are held directly accountable and are pushed by our users for new features and fixes.

For the first year, all support traffic ran through support@sftpdrive.com. You could usually expect a response within a few minutes [or worst, a few hours]. People love a quick response from the lead developer of a product they just shelled out $39 for. Predictably, as the volume of e-mail grew, we had to switch over to some method that would allow us to consolidate some of this effort.

Next came the Magnetk Support Forum. Forum-based support works great. We avoid answering the same questions by making public all our previous support interactions. Users help each other and answer questions for us. Some users really buy into the forum and provide all sorts of interesting tips and tricks that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. That’s awesome. In addition, a forum builds a searchable ad-hoc-knowledge-base, where anyone can search for an answer without ever having to ask the question. But it’s not some super-lame knowledge base where some chump in the “support” department decided what questions you wanted answers to. Man, I hate corporate knowledge bases.

Still, the forum isn’t perfect. The idea of a message board really turns some people off, and it is hard categorize or organize support in any meaningful way. Enter Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction is a great small company who is squarely focused on helping companies like Magnetk provide support to their customers. Get Satisfaction reduces the amount of friction required for a user to ask a question and makes it even easier to receive notifcations of a response.

Now our users can also quickly follow the responses and progress of a problem they also have by clicking the “I have this problem, too!” button. Get Satisfaction also excels in helping categorize Questions, Ideas, Problems, or pure discussion. In addition, it provides some more of that modern-web-2.0-application feel that most of our customers have come to really appreciate in other places. I must admit, it’ll be nice to be able to tag posts with meaningful information so we can help build up a good search index later on.

Get Satisfaction is being used successfully by hundreds of companies: Timbuk2, Twitter and Pownce are just some of our favorites. They have a huge number of active users providing support to each other and to the companies. I have a feeling this will work great.