ExpanDrive

We’re excited to release ExpanDrive 2.0 for the Mac [release notes]!

It’s EXTREMELY fast.

Over the past year, we’ve put together an entirely new SFTP engine, based on a hybrid of OpenSSH and Python. Expect more than double the performance when transferring large files, and we’ve completely re-written our metadata caching architecture. Browsing around is even faster. Oh – we also now detect edits that have been made on the server. Awesome.

S3 support

In addition, we’re introducing support for Amazon S3 as a filesystem type in ExpanDrive. You can now mount you buckets and drag and drop files to them from Finder. We’ve even built a contextual menu plugin to the Finder so you can set permissions on those keys. Certain technical limitations make S3 difficult to implement well as a filesystem, notably that you have to upload full files AND know the size beforehand, but we’ve got it working pretty well. Please continue to send great feedback to support@expandrive.com

FTP/FTPS grows up

FTP/FTPS support is no longer in beta and has many important fixes and compatibility updates to help it work with the plethora of buggy FTP servers that are in wide distribution.

GUI refresh

We’ve also spent a lot of effort refreshing the GUI:

ExpanDrive is available for $39.95, $19.95 upgrade — free upgrade if you’ve purchased in the past 60 days.

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

Documentation is an area need to work harder on. In part, the simplicity of ExpanDrive leaves us with the feeling that there isn’t much we need to document. It works and acts like a filesystem, that’s easy enough – what’s there to say?

However, with our growing user base and feature set, we owe everyone better documentation. We’re currently working on a new and improved documentation wiki with a user guide for ExpanDrive. The guide is deployed on top of Instiki and is publically editable. We’d love some help with it, so feel free edit.

I’m happy to announce that we’ve just gone live with ExpanDrive 1.3.3, and it’s got some awesome new stuff. Get it downloading now, so you can play with it by the time you’re done reading this post.

MacFUSE 2.0

A few weeks ago the crew at Google release MacFUSE 2.0. ExpanDrive is built on top of MacFUSE, and the new version brings a lot of exciting improvements. Most importantly, once you upgrade to MacFUSE 2.0, ExpanDrive will notice much more quickly when files change on the remote server.

When you run ExpanDrive 1.3.3 it should offer to upgrade your copy of MacFUSE for you. In rare circumstances, our MacFUSE installer hasn’t worked correctly for people. If it gives you any trouble, you can download a copy of MacFUSE directly from the Google Code site and try their installer, which has worked for almost everyone so far. (It’s the exact same thing we distribute with ExpanDrive.) If you do run into MacFUSE installation issues, and you’d like to help me fix them, then send me (jonshea@) or support@ an email.

Amit, Ted, and the rest of the MacFUSE team have done some crazy impressive things with MacFUSE. If you’re at all interested in filesystems, then you should definitely check it out. We owe them many thanks for all their hard work on the project.

Improved FTP Support

ExpanDrive 1.3.3 brings even better and more widespread FTP support. Occasionally, ExpanDrive might not connect properly to a particular FTP server. If this happens to you, then send us an email (with a temporary login to the server, if you can.) We’ve been able to fix nearly every FTP server that’s been sent to us within a few days. The reason some FTP servers don’t work is that the FTP protocol isn’t well standardized. Sometimes a server gives out output in a format we don’t expect because we’ve never seen that server before. Once we see their output format it’s usually pretty straight forward for us to fix.

Further information can be found in our release notes.

ExpanDrive 1.3.2 is a highly recommended bug fix release, fixing many FTP compatibility issues as well as SFTP stability. For anyone who was trouble connecting to a specific FTP server, please give this release a try. If there are any remaining problems, we’ll sort them out!

In addition, there are also some small new features to increase usability.

Release notes are below, or here as always.

    New Features

• Global Drive Manager shortcut – you can now bind a global shortcut that brings forward the Drive Manager no matter what application you’re in. This makes using ExpanDrive a mouse-free activity!
• Drives will now be revealed in Finder upon connection unless disabled in preferences
• Drives can now be duplicated in the Drive Manager
• Ability to set up ExpanDrive as default SFTP/FTP client
• Added Dutch, Swedish, and Simplified Chinese Localizations
• GUI now responds to ftp:// and ftps:// URLs and can receive SFTP/FTP/FTPS urls that are dropped on it
• Apple-f now brings focus to the filter bar in drive manager
• SSH Channel keep-alives are now sent to ensure active connections

    Fixes

• FTP compatibility dramatically improved
• Updated the documentation to better reflect the 1.3 feature set & look
• Support for iLife ’08 and a number of other bug fixes
• Much better MacFUSE installation detection & cleanup
• Orphaned mount points in /Volumes are now much more aggressively cleaned up
• Many small bug fixes and performance improvements.
• Fixed a number of memory leaks
• Applescript name matching on connect bug – fixes issues with the expan script

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

FTP Drives:

They said we couldn’t do it. They said we shouldn’t do it. I said we shouldn’t do it. But we did it. Why did we do it? To prove how tough we are? To make a pile of money? Just because it was there? I can’t say for sure, but it’s done now. In version 1.3 ExpanDrive supports connections to plain ftp (and ftp/ssl) servers.

We’re calling it “beta” for now because we expect that there are still some bugs to shake out, but so far it looks pretty good. No, it looks very good. Good like streaming two movies over a local wireless connection at the same time good. That said, the ftp “standard” isn’t quite as standard as one might like if one were writing a filesystem for it, and there are a lot of different ftp servers out there. If you have an ftp server that ExpanDrive can’t connect to and you can give us a temporary login to that server, then we’ll send you a generous ExpanDrive coupon for your trouble. (And we’ll use the temporary login to try and make ExpanDrive work with your server.)

New trials for everyone:

We want everyone to love ExpanDrive as much as we do. That’s why we have a free 30 day trial period. For version 1.3 we’ve reset everyone’s trial, and we’ll continue to automatically reset the trial after every major version release. If you tried version 1.1 and it didn’t grab your fancy, then give it a try again. (We’ve also decrease the intrusiveness and frequency with which we nag you to register.)

Reconnect:

It’s not all about the new features. There also always needs to be “bug fixes and performance improvements”, and we’ve got those too. We’re mildly embarrassed at how far we let our SFTP reconnect feature slip. You know what I’m talking about: your server turned into a folder that didn’t do anything. We didn’t talk about it because we knew we were going to fix it any day now, and no one wants to draw attention to a feature that used to work. Well, I’m happy to say that not only did we fix it, we made it much better.

ExpanDrive used to guess when you’d lost a connection when it took a long time to hear back from a server. (“Hello? Server? Are you still there? Can you hear me, server? Hello…”) We now use OS X system notifications for network availability. ExpanDrive knows when the internet disappears and reappears, when your IP address changes, and when your computer is going to sleep or waking up. This means that server reconnect is faster and more reliable than it used to be, and also that you shouldn’t ever experience a “-36 error” just because you have a laggy connection.

Localizations:

ExpanDrive is currently available in German, French, Danish, and Romanian. Spanish and Japanese will be in our next release. (Many thanks to Jannis Leidel, Nicolas Doualot, CasperT, and Sebastian Pascu, ). We’d love some help with other languages!

Beta Updates:

Finally, we’ve got a lot of things cooking right now that are going to get released in the near future. If you’re like me, then you want to use the new stuff as soon as you can get your hands on it, even before the stodgy, uptight Magnetk QA department doesn’t want to give it up yet. If that’s the case then you can now choose to automatically update to the latest beta release. Our beta updates will contain no known bugs when they’re released, and they’ll be reasonably tested, but they’ll definitely be beta.

Download:

Get the latest version over at the ExpanDrive page or right here

TextMate is one of the most popular editors to use in conjuction with ExpanDrive. TextMate does not have SFTP support built in, but with ExpanDrive you can edit remote projects directly from within Textmate, as if they were on your hard drive. There is no distinction between what is local, and what is remote.

TextMate has an interesting habit of refreshing the metadata on every file in a current project every time the window regains focus, even if the file isn’t open. It is checking if a file has been changed or deleted by some external process. When those files are on local hard disk, you don’t notice this additional overhead. However, on a higher latency drive, like a network drive, it has the effect of sending out a request over the network for each file checked. If your project has a large number of files, there is a noticeable delay in gaining window as Textmate issue hundreds of requests that get piped over a network.

ExpanDrive employs a variety of caching techniques that alleviate this delay. However, if you have HUGE projects, like an entire rails tree, even ExpanDrive might show a small delay. In this case, consider installing the Ciarán Walsh’s ReMate plugin. ReMate allows you to selectively disable the automatic refresh when gaining focus, effectively removing any delay you might experience.