ExpanDrive

FTP Drives:

They said we couldn’t do it. They said we shouldn’t do it. I said we shouldn’t do it. But we did it. Why did we do it? To prove how tough we are? To make a pile of money? Just because it was there? I can’t say for sure, but it’s done now. In version 1.3 ExpanDrive supports connections to plain ftp (and ftp/ssl) servers.

We’re calling it “beta” for now because we expect that there are still some bugs to shake out, but so far it looks pretty good. No, it looks very good. Good like streaming two movies over a local wireless connection at the same time good. That said, the ftp “standard” isn’t quite as standard as one might like if one were writing a filesystem for it, and there are a lot of different ftp servers out there. If you have an ftp server that ExpanDrive can’t connect to and you can give us a temporary login to that server, then we’ll send you a generous ExpanDrive coupon for your trouble. (And we’ll use the temporary login to try and make ExpanDrive work with your server.)

New trials for everyone:

We want everyone to love ExpanDrive as much as we do. That’s why we have a free 30 day trial period. For version 1.3 we’ve reset everyone’s trial, and we’ll continue to automatically reset the trial after every major version release. If you tried version 1.1 and it didn’t grab your fancy, then give it a try again. (We’ve also decrease the intrusiveness and frequency with which we nag you to register.)

Reconnect:

It’s not all about the new features. There also always needs to be “bug fixes and performance improvements”, and we’ve got those too. We’re mildly embarrassed at how far we let our SFTP reconnect feature slip. You know what I’m talking about: your server turned into a folder that didn’t do anything. We didn’t talk about it because we knew we were going to fix it any day now, and no one wants to draw attention to a feature that used to work. Well, I’m happy to say that not only did we fix it, we made it much better.

ExpanDrive used to guess when you’d lost a connection when it took a long time to hear back from a server. (“Hello? Server? Are you still there? Can you hear me, server? Hello…”) We now use OS X system notifications for network availability. ExpanDrive knows when the internet disappears and reappears, when your IP address changes, and when your computer is going to sleep or waking up. This means that server reconnect is faster and more reliable than it used to be, and also that you shouldn’t ever experience a “-36 error” just because you have a laggy connection.

Localizations:

ExpanDrive is currently available in German, French, Danish, and Romanian. Spanish and Japanese will be in our next release. (Many thanks to Jannis Leidel, Nicolas Doualot, CasperT, and Sebastian Pascu, ). We’d love some help with other languages!

Beta Updates:

Finally, we’ve got a lot of things cooking right now that are going to get released in the near future. If you’re like me, then you want to use the new stuff as soon as you can get your hands on it, even before the stodgy, uptight Magnetk QA department doesn’t want to give it up yet. If that’s the case then you can now choose to automatically update to the latest beta release. Our beta updates will contain no known bugs when they’re released, and they’ll be reasonably tested, but they’ll definitely be beta.

Download:

Get the latest version over at the ExpanDrive page or right here

If you watch tv, then you’ve no doubt noticed the complete absence of new content which infests the summer months. For a little reprieve, check out Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, a 15 minute, low-budget side project by Joss Whedon (the creator of “Firefly” and the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, and writer of the under-rated movie with the same name).

New episodes on Thursday and Saturday. Free until Sunday.

Are you using bash-completion? I bet you think you are. I bet you’re not. It’s a horrible name (up there with “The Wire” and “Battlestar Galactica”), because people hear it and think that they know what it is, but they’re wrong. Don’t prejudge the bash-completion. It’s much, much more.

Everyone knows about [tab] completion. It’s great. We love it. But, it leaves a lot to be desired. How many times have you done something like this:

Continuity:~$ cd m[tab]

and then seen this:

magnetk/     makay_tex_source.tex     mathjob.pdf     
methods of theoretical physics.pdf     monterpp.pdf

Three pdfs, a tex source file, and one directory. Do you know how many times I’ve wanted to cd into a pdf file? Zero. I’ve never wanted to cd anything but a directory. So why does [tab] completion show me all those files that I’m obviously not interested in?

There’s a better way. In fact, bash already has a robust programmable completion system managed through the builtin commands compgen and complete. While bash is distributed with “programmable completion”, it isn’t distributed with “programmed completion”.

That’s where bash-completion comes in. It’s more than 9000 lines of pre-programmed completion artificial intelligence. It knows that you only cd into directories. It knows passwd only works on users, groupmod only works on groups, unalias only works aliases, and which only works on commands. And that’s just in the first 150 lines. The current version even includes a whole svn subprogram, so that it can figure out valid targets even for the various svn commands.

You can install bash-completion by Macports (sudo port install bash-completion), fink (fink install bash-completion), or apt-get (apt-get install bash-completion). You can also install it by hand. This involves downloading the file, unzipping it, and putting it somewhere.

Regardless of how you install it, you need to make sure it gets sourced when you start a new shell. Sometimes Macports et alias will do this for you, and sometimes they won’t. If you’re new to this, then source just reads a file and executes it line by line. Add a line to .profile (or another file that gets loaded when you open a new shell) that says source /path/to/bash_completion. For those of you with Twitter-eqsue character constraints on your dot-config files, you can also say . /path/to/bash_completion, where the . operator is a synonym for source that saves 5 characters at the cost of being infinitely less readable, and infinitely easier to misinterpret.

Then you’re done. Load up a new shell and enjoy. If you’re used to stupid file completion, then prepare to be amazed. You’ll find yourself groping around with [tab] in places you never would have imagined before, and you won’t even realize you’re doing it.

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.