ExpanDrive

Magnetk is thrilled to announce the release of ExpanDrive for OS X, our second product. We’ve been working for a long time on ExpanDrive, and are very proud of the result. Our early adopters seem quite pleased too.

ExpanDrive builds SFTP support right into the core of OS X - just like SftpDrive builds SFTP support into Windows. Now any application on your Mac can read and write remote files as easily as if they were on a USB drive plugged into your computer. ExpanDrive even brings SFTP right into Finder, letting you manage your remote server as easily as your MacBook. We’ve already pushed two updates in response to user feedback in just the first week of open release, polishing the UI and improving user experiences all around. In the coming weeks and months ExpanDrive will expand beyond just SFTP, letting you access a wide variety of data through the filesystem. Keep an eye on this blog, as well as our Twitter feed, to keep track of the developments.

Amit Singh just released MacFUSE 1.0, adding a great number of new features relevant to developers, not the least of which is support for Leopard. Along with that, there are many of bug fixes and general improvements. Amit is a fulltime engineer at Google, recently penned a nearly 1,000 page book on OS X and his “spare time” authors MacFUSE. Given the scope of the changelog I’m not sure Amit sleeps. For that, we thank him.

My 5 month old MacBook Pro often has the MDS process chewing about 45-50% of CPU at various points in the day. Given that MDS is supposed to sit around and casually index - so that Spotlight can quickly perform a search, this CPU usage pattern is a red flag. Chances are something is wrong with either the disk or the Spotlight metadata index [what MDS manages]. After using Disk Utility to verify the volume, I tried Spotless. It worked great.

Spotless is a nice little $15 nagware utility made by Fixamac Software that helps you delete and recreate the Spotlight metadata folder and index, so that it can let MDS rebuild from scratch. It offers a few other moderately useful features, but if MDS is getting aggressive, this makes it real easy to get a clean rebuild.

After much delay, SftpDrive Version 1.6 is out the door. The major enhancement is Vista support. Along with Vista, there are many small tweaks for connection stability and various bug fixes that have been added.

Going forward, we are working on SftpDrive for Windows and OS X at a breakneck pace. While we’re excited to have worked on the Slingshot project, SftpDrive remains our focus. Our shortlist includes dramatic speed enhancements, greater interoperability between various SFTP servers, and most importantly releasing the OS X client.

Another open source project working on a SFTP filesystem for the Mac can be found at:

http://mac.pqrs.org/sshfs/

While it’s certainly not production quality yet, it is certainly encouraging that other people feel that the lack of an SFTP filesystem is a rather obvious pain point.

Amit Singh over at Google has ported FUSE to the Mac. Good Work!

FUSE is popular user space framework for Linux, and now the Mac. What this means is that it is much easier for filesystem developers to create and test new filesystem implementations. Filesystems run, usually, as extensions to the kernel of the OS - like a device driver. When code runs in the kernel, it is much more difficult to develop and debug. When code crashes in the kernel, your machine crashes. It’s hard.

FUSE tries to abstract away some of that pain for developers, by providing a “general” filesystem driver that communicates with a service in user space. Then you can write an extension to the FUSE user space service, much like normal application development, and have it extend the power of the general purpose filesystem driver. This is a real boon for programmers.

Also cool — Google has a patch for SSHFS, a fuse module, so that you can mount an SSH/SFTP server using MacFUSE.

It’s no secret that we’re working on SftpDrive for OS X, it’s nice to see other people out there are trying to get some innovative work done on OS X network filesystems. SftpDrive:Mac is our number one dev priority, and along with that iMac, we’ve got a half dozen other Macs that we’re using for development and testing. I’ve gotten quite a few emails and IMs today about MacFUSE. We’re excited that it is being done. SftpDrive for the Mac will be released as a very polished product with robust reconnect support, a simple user interface, and the a great overall experience - just like our windows client. Having SSHFS is great, but beachballing finder when your wifi connection drops or you hop to a new AP isn’t very fun.

We’re not bashing FUSE by any means - but this example illustrates certain virtues of commercial software, developed by people that really care about what they are doing. Software where developers spend an inordinate amount of time solving edge cases, so that the experience doesn’t have gaps. When you plunk down $39 for SftpDrive, you get software that effortlessly hops between wireless access points and has intelligent caching to provide a good experience while using poorly behaving applications. And just like free software, you get developers who really cared about what they are doing.

That last 20% of functionality really does take 80% of the effort.