ExpanDrive

ExpanDrive 1.2.9 is out now and available for download [release notes]. There are three major features of this release, apart from a host of small bug fixes and tweaks that we’ve put in the program in response to user input. New icons, MacFUSE 1.7, and new packaging/installation.

Long overdue, ExpanDrive has a new application icon and menu bar icon. They’re pretty hot. Many thanks to Jordan Langille over at OneToad Design who tirelessly worked with us through quite a number of revisions.

The second major change to ExpanDrive 1.2.9 comes with the addition of MacFUSE 1.7 [see CHANGELOG]. This removes a variety of small incompatabilities and addresses some major issues with certain applications saving after upgrading to OS X 10.5.3.

Again, long overdue - we’ve performed a complete overhaul of our installation technique. We’ve ditched of a PackageMaker in favor of a simple ZIP based distribution. MacFUSE will be magically installed or upgraded [with your permission] upon launch.

After a month of work, we just pushed ExpanDrive 1.2.7 out the door. This is a bug fix release - but it’s a good one. Check out the release notes here.

In the past month or two we’ve been heavily dog fooding ExpanDrive, spending an incredible amount of effort trying to identify and polish out the remaining bugs and really take stability to the next level. ExpanDrive aims to be a super-high-quality filesystem that works really well and is easy to use.

We are working closely with our users to identify and fix outstanding issues. There are always more bugs to fix - but 1.2.7 represents a lot of testing and fixing that we don’t want to go unnoticed.

Going forward, we’re going to refocus efforts on new features and protocols. But for now for now, we aim to perfect what is already there.

We’re doing it again! Become a fan of ExpanDrive on FaceBook and get access to a $5 off coupon good for ExpanDrive for Mac or SftpDrive for Windows

ExpanDrive’s FaceBook page

A few weeks ago at WWDC I did a short on camera interview with with Brett Terpstra from The Unofficial Apple Weblog as part of their interview series with indie Mac developers. We chat for a little bit about ExpanDrive: why it’s cool, and where we plan to go with the software (S3/Flickr support?). Check out the video over at TUAW.

It’s no secret that some of the best software comes from companies that eat their own dog food. But some programs are easier to dog food than others. If you’re working on project management app or bug tracker, then it’s simple. Your own software is part of your workflow. You find a bug, you fix it in your own software.

On the other hand, if you write software for keeping track of dry cleaning, or managing taxi queues, then you probably don’t use your own software all that much. I mean, once every few days you’ll pretend that you’re using your software. You’ll go through the motions and make sure everything works, but that’s not the same as using it. That’s probably why dry cleaning and taxi software blows.

We’ve been eating dog food here at Magnetk since our beta version. Sometimes, when I’m working on the web site or or server-fu, I’ll spend the whole day working through ExpanDrive. But other times I’ll be working on local files in XCode or emacs, and I end up hardly using ExpanDrive at all.

That’s about to change. Today we each made an entry called localhost in our Drive Managers that connects right back to our own computer. Our goal is to do 100% of our development over ExpanDrive. We’re eating dog food at every meal.

Along with making awesome software, we strive to provide the highest quality support to all of our customers. From the beginning, we’ve done 100% developer based support. We, the developers, are held directly accountable and are pushed by our users for new features and fixes.

For the first year, all support traffic ran through support@sftpdrive.com. You could usually expect a response within a few minutes [or worst, a few hours]. People love a quick response from the lead developer of a product they just shelled out $39 for. Predictably, as the volume of e-mail grew, we had to switch over to some method that would allow us to consolidate some of this effort.

Next came the Magnetk Support Forum. Forum-based support works great. We avoid answering the same questions by making public all our previous support interactions. Users help each other and answer questions for us. Some users really buy into the forum and provide all sorts of interesting tips and tricks that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own. That’s awesome. In addition, a forum builds a searchable ad-hoc-knowledge-base, where anyone can search for an answer without ever having to ask the question. But it’s not some super-lame knowledge base where some chump in the “support” department decided what questions you wanted answers to. Man, I hate corporate knowledge bases.

Still, the forum isn’t perfect. The idea of a message board really turns some people off, and it is hard categorize or organize support in any meaningful way. Enter Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction is a great small company who is squarely focused on helping companies like Magnetk provide support to their customers. Get Satisfaction reduces the amount of friction required for a user to ask a question and makes it even easier to receive notifcations of a response.

Now our users can also quickly follow the responses and progress of a problem they also have by clicking the “I have this problem, too!” button. Get Satisfaction also excels in helping categorize Questions, Ideas, Problems, or pure discussion. In addition, it provides some more of that modern-web-2.0-application feel that most of our customers have come to really appreciate in other places. I must admit, it’ll be nice to be able to tag posts with meaningful information so we can help build up a good search index later on.

Get Satisfaction is being used successfully by hundreds of companies: Timbuk2, Twitter and Pownce are just some of our favorites. They have a huge number of active users providing support to each other and to the companies. I have a feeling this will work great.

Fresh off the press, out today, come and get it while it’s hot. Since 1.2 seems to be the magic number, that’s what we’re calling ours too.

Big ticket items: free space remaining now displays correctly on servers that support python. A filter field’s been added to the Drive Manager for those of us that have oh-so-many drives. Public key support is far more robust - in addition, encrypted private keys are also now supported.

Also, you might want to try a little Dino Run.

In version 1.15 we’ve included a little script called expan that lets you connect and eject drives right from the command line. Because nobody wants to have to hike all the way over to the gui when they’re already cranking on their keyboard in the Terminal. Am I right, or am I right?

You can install expan with just a button press (and a password entry) from the ExpanDrive preferences window. It works exactly like you’re probably all ready guessing

 expan connect driveName
 expan eject driveName

The script will connect and eject every drive that has driveName in its URL or as part of its Drive Name. If you want to connect all your drives, then something like expan connect . will probably do the trick.

Finally, because even desktop apps can be Web 2.0, we’ve made a screencast so you can see expan in action.

Features and fixes include:

• sftp:// URLs are now handled by ExpanDrive - clicking on sftp://username@server will add a session into the drive manager and make a connection
• Easy control of ExpanDrive from the Terminal using the command expan. It allows you to connect using simple commands like expan connect drive or expan eject drive. The command can be installed in General Preferences.
• Fixed bug where “error: -36″ would sometimes interrupt large transfers in Finder on high latency connections
• Fixed bug which would require the user to enter admin credentials and then still fail a copy in certain situations
• Auto update screen now displays correctly in all locales - some were seeing a all white screen previously
• ExpanDrive now handles expandrivelicense:// style urls for registration
• Drive Manager window position is now remembered between sessions
• Many small bug fixes

As always, the release notes are here.

I’m going to be giving an informal talk about MacFUSE at tomorrow, May 8th, at the CocoaHeads Boston meeting. Along with an overview of MacFUSE, I’ll try to conjure up some interesting tidbits about ExpanDrive development and why we think developing filesystems is more interesting than making web applications. Stop by if you’re around: MIT building e51, room 149 - 7pm.