ExpanDrive

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.

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

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.

ExpanDrive 1.04 is available for download and is also available on the the auto-updater. It includes a variety of fixes and small refinements, all listed in the release notes. The user interface continues to be refined - we now have a multi-pane preferences dialog that includes some new options users have been requesting such as the ability to disable display of the drive manager when launched.

You can disable display of the ExpanDrive manager at program launch as well as display the recent drives menu in line or as a sub menu.

in line

as a submenu

On the filesystem end, our meta-data cache is now even more powerful. Acess to large projects in applications such as TextMate is sped up dramatically. Symbolic links that point to relative paths are now correctly interpreted. A variety of smaller improvements and bug fixes have also been made.