ExpanDrive

We’re compiling a use-cases section for our web site and we’d love some help showing off why ExpanDrive and SftpDrive are awesome.

Both ExpanDrive and SftpDrive allow for many unique workflows involving secure access to remote files, and we’d love to have our users help show off some interesting or unexpected tasks they can now accomplish. The best 5 screencast submissions that we receive by May 9th will be rewarded with a 5-pack of free licenses.

E-mail jeff@magnetk.com with any questions.

Amit Singh at Google has released MacFUSE 1.5 into the wild, with a variety of changes and bug fixes. ExpanDrive uses the MacFUSE library to interface with the Mac filesystem, and the next reversion of ExpanDrive will integrate this revision. In addition, we’ll provide some more transparent facilities for users to uninstall MacFUSE if they desire.

For ExpanDrive, the most notable bug fix in MacFUSE 1.5 addresses the problem where ExpanDrive would occasionally show a mounted drive as having 0KB of free space, effectively disallowing writes to the volume.

Check out the Changelog for more information:
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/wiki/CHANGELOG

AirBear
You know that scene in “American Beauty” where they go on and on about how “beautiful” the grocery bag was while it floated in the wind? I thought that was BS. People only call grocery bags beautiful because they’re trying to sound contemplative and deep.

Eagle kills a kid
Jimmy: Ah Mr. McLure I have a crazy friend who says it’s wrong to eat meat. Is he crazy?
Troy McClure: No, just ignorant. You see, your crazy friend never heard of the food chain.

The future
“ExpanDrive is like living in the future”

Generators
“Springing this on the uninitiated might cause their head to explode.”

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas
Did anyone get the feeling that this elite “A-team” was in way over their heads?

http://www.songbirdnest.com/

I’ve never really liked iTunes. I’ve dealt with it since I switched completely to Mac OS (right about when I joined the Magnetk team), but it’s been tough. My specific problem with iTunes is its poor handling of streaming playlists. I like the Winamp interface, where the playlist is king, and the library is a master of its own domain, but they can communicate pretty easily through drag’n'drop. Not so with iTunes, where the library takes precedence over playlists. There’s no clean way to do what I liked to do with Winamp, which is highlight five songs from a random folder and have them open in a new Winamp playlist to play. Opening songs with iTunes sticks them in the library, where there is no way to reorder them on the fly. M3U playlists are pain to use as well. I have a bunch of those, and the only way I’ve found to work with them is to open iTunes, create a new playlist, drag in the m3u file, then play the first few seconds of each song. Why that last part? iTunes doesn’t query the metadata of the tracks until they play, so I can’t even tell what songs they are. Ugh.

So I’ve been watching Songbird for awhile, mostly because they promised a stable Mac client that is one-third Winamp, one-third iTunes (mostly the music store third), and one-third Mozilla browser. They’ve delivered. It’s not quite as fully-featured as Winamp (yet; Winamp is version 5, after all). But it’s completely open source and uses XUL, the Mozilla “User Interface Language”. Anyone who’s ever written a Firefox extension can try their hand at extending Songbird. There are a bunch of add-ons already available. The first one I grabbed is called “now playing”, and it replicates the Winamp-style playlist.

Some of you may be wondering why there’s a built in web browser. The answer is that it’s not some silly webTV-type tack-on. It’s wholly integral to the way Songbird links to the world. To this end, it adds some wonderful features to the standard Mozilla-style browser. My favorite is the way it scans every page for media content and automatically creates a playlist for you. If you frequent music blogs that post mp3s, this is an awesome feature. The library is very similar to Winamp’s, and there’s even a nice “downloads” tab.

Songbird is everything I’ve wanted in a media player, and it’s open source to boot. I’m very excited to write some extensions. I’ll post them here when I do.

Magnetk is a proud sponsor of Twisted, an open-source framework which helps make up the core of ExpanDrive. Twisted is a cross-platform event-driven networking engine, written in Python, that is developed by a smart & dedicated team across the world. Consider making a donation to the Twisted Software Foundation and help out this extraordinary open-source project. If you donate at their bronze level or higher, your banner will be displayed on their front page for the rest of 2008. Donate before May 15th and you’re a founding sponsor. Your banner will have a permanent home on their founding sponsors page.

Jeff asks me to write up a little blog post about the new AppleScript support in ExpanDrive, and I’m all about it. I figure I’ll write up the documentation on our site, and then cut and paste it over to our blog. It’s a two birds, one stone situation. But first the wiki software was out of date, so I feel like I should upgrade that. I type a bit of documentation, get bored with it, and decide I’ll work on the blog post. When I log into WordPress I find out that it’s out of date too, so I run another upgrade.

Finally, before I start writing I’ve got to do a lap on NetNewsWire. I see that TUAW posted about ExpanDrive again. Nice. Hey, wait a minute… I’ve been scooped! They stole my blog post. Fortunately, they didn’t get everything.

ExpanDrive now has AppleScript support. Using AppleScript you can make, remove, connect, and eject drives.

The connect and eject commands can both act on a drive or list of drives, so that these all work more or less like you probably expect:

connect drive 1  
connect (every drive whose server ¬  
              contains "sftpdrive.com")  
eject every drive

You can also connect a drive using connect "myServer", which will connect every drive that has “myServer” as a substring of its url.

If you want to make a new drive, try something like this:

make new drive at end with properties ¬
       {server:"brandnew.server.com", ¬
        username:"tremendous"}

Anything else you want to see in Applescript? Leave a note in the comments.