ExpanDrive

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.

Michael, our brilliant FTPFS lead programmer, hits the nail on the head. Or something.

Implementing a filesystem over FTP is like using a wrench to pound in screws.

It’s hard to get both correctness and speed when you’re building a filesystem abstraction on top of a horribly old insecure protocol that was in no way designed for such. FTP is Telnet, for files.