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.

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

The thing I miss most about Perforce is the absence of good tools for visual diff comparison. With a bit of work, you can get a reasonable approximation of this functionality using Changes.app.

First, install the Terminal Utility using the Changes drop down menu. This installs chdiff, a utility that will let you load up two files for diffing in git.

There are two good options for viewing Git diffs. The first lets you view the diffs in serial order, loading up a series of windows in Changes. To get that running you only need to set the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF variable to point to this script:

#!/bin/sh<br/> [ $# -eq 7 ] && /usr/bin/env chdiff --wait "$2" "$5"

Another option is this ruby script on 5xm.org which will check out two particular revisions to a temporary folder, and then allow you to diff the entire trees in place.

The Changes.app wiki offers some more advice on Git and other SCMs, if you’re in search of more help.