ExpanDrive 1.3: The Most Awesome ExpanDrive Ever
A couple months ago, I reviewed ExpanDrive, the application that gave a seamless way to treat SFTP/SSH drives like real hard drives. At the time, many people were unhappy that it didn’t have FTP and FTPS support. Well, I can now say that ExpanDrive has support for both of these in version 1.3.
As said above, the major new feature added is support for FTP and FTPS network drives. In case you didn’t know, FTP is the most common form of connecting to a network drive. There is also FTPS (do not mistake this with SFTP), or FTP/SSH, which adds a lot of security to FTP. Setting up an FTP drive is just like setting up any other drive in ExpanDrive. You just click New Drive in the main window and you get a popup with a lot of options. Then, if you want to set up an SFTP/SSH drive, you select SFTP/SSH from the popup, and if you want to setup an FTP/FTPS drive, you just select FTP/FTPS (Beta). Lastly you just enter any other information that you need to connect to the drive. As you can see, this feature is still in Beta, so it is not perfected. But, it has worked perfectly so far for me.
There is also a major bug fix added in ExpanDrive 1.3. In previous versions, if you had a lagging connection, you might have gotten a -36 Error (you wouldn’t be able to connect to the drive). Well, that was because of the way that ExpanDrive used to see if you’d lost connection with the server. Instead of using OS X notifications, it used its own system, which didn’t work very well. Well, now it does use OS X notifications, so it knows if you can’t connect to the server, or if you just don’t have Internet. So, for those of you who experienced this major bug, it has been fixed, and ExpanDrive can be useful for you again.
The last two features added in ExpanDrive 1.3 are fairly minor. One is localizations. There are now localizations for German, Romanian, French and Danish. So, if you are from one of those countries, you can now actually use ExpanDrive! The last new feature is the ability to see Beta releases of ExpanDrive. If you are like me and love having the absolute newest version of your software (or if you just want to help the developer tackle bugs), this is a great improvement.
ExpanDrive by Magnetk retails for $29, and you can download a free 30-day trial from their site. If you had the 30-day trial before, but never bought it, they have reset all trials, so you can download 1.3 and see if these new features are exactly what you need. They will also be doing this for every other major release of ExpanDrive. Version 1.3 adds a great new feature that makes it the awesomest ExpanDrive ever!
Tried it. Couldn’t get it to work with any ftp site. I would be happy to buy it if it worked. Transmit connects with no problems. Expand drive does not.
This essentially seems to be someone charging 30 dollars for a repackaging of google’s sshfs/fuse for mac. If you’re not technically incompetent, those probably work the same or better, and don’t cost anything.