ExpanDrive

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

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.

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.

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.

Many of our users have asked how to restrict a user to a particular directories using OpenSSH. Here is a post from one of the OpenSSH devs describing how you can use the new ChrootDirectory feature to set that up. There are a variety of other ways to accomplish this using more traditional methods - if you’ve had success, please post in the comments and share.

SftpDrive v1.7.8 is out- wrapping up a variety of bug fixes and enhancements - most importantly some connection robustness and convenience features. Check the changelog for details.

If you’re running anything that is previous to 1.7, this a highly recommended upgrade. We’ll be better in the future about notifying version bumps via this blog.

Interested in helping us test SftpDrive for OS X?  Email jeff@magnetk.com to sign up. Please include a bit of info on your hardware along with you’re hoping to use it for. Thanks!

SftpDrive has been under quite heavy development over the past couple months, as you might’ve noticed. We’re releasing version 1.6.5 today. It includes:

• Automatic update support. SftpDrive will [optionally] check to make sure you’re running the latest version and notify you when upgrades are available
• Much improved Vista support
• Important fixes for UTF-8 support and international filenames
• Speed improvements along with many small improvements to increase application support and speed

Also, it’s worth noting that the Mac client is still under heavy development and will be the subject of more news on this blog in the coming month or two.

Right now we’re offering a promotion where you’ll get a completely free license of SftpDrive when you sign up for a BlueHost account - referred through us.

It’s a pretty fantastic deal, $6.95 a month gets you 300GB of storage with 3TB of transfer a month, all mounted quite nicely as a drive letter in Windows. Oh, and there are a whole bunch of other features. Although we’re currently sitting on a lovely Joyent Accelerator [which is a dream], we used BlueHost for a couple years while starting up Magnetk. They served us quite well. As a warning, I think they still require you to email/fax a copy of a photo ID for ssh access, which I admit, is annoying.

So, to review. For $6.95 a month you get a free copy of SftpDrive and a 300gig drive out in the cloud to do whatever you want with. We’re going to set up similar deals with other hosting companies that offer affiliate/referral programs. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Click here to sign up here.

Once you’re signed up with BlueHost, just email us with the info and we’ll process the coupon.

We recently added a screencast to the front page of SftpDrive.com, it’s a good place to start if you’re not entirely sure what SftpDrive does or what it is different.

Screencasts are an incredible way of cleary conveying what a program does or how it is supposed to be used. It allows you to walk anyone through a complex sequence of events at a specifically chosen pace and add however much additional instruction or annotation that is needed.

The tough part is making them. You’re often confronted with a choice between a small file with blurry images or a gigantic file that is still imperfect. To get it right requires some experience and finesse. You’ll probably also want some expensive software if you’re going to do a real bang up job. Forget about all the effort it takes to learn how to use it.

What if you want to just make a simple screencast and not have it suck? I thought I’d write a bit on how we attempted to achieve that lofty goal. (more…)