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