ExpanDrive

Commercial; $39.95

Current Version: 2.1.1 (June 15, 2010)

ExpanDrive adds robust, two-way FTP and SFTP capabilities to your Mac. It's based upon the remarkable MacFUSE project from Google (which enables programmers to provide support for a variety of file systems within applications that run in what is known as "user space" - the part of your computer that you interact with on a regular basis).

In essence, ExpanDrive enables you to treat a remote FTP or SFTP server as a local hard drive, with all of the speed and flexibility that comes with accessing files as if they were local. Once you use ExpanDrive's menu bar menu to configure ExpanDrive, it performs its magic entirely in the background, and you use the Finder and your other favorite applications to access your remote files the way you would with any hard drive or removable drive. Since ExpanDrive provides access to remote files as if they were local drives, all of your applications can access these files with equal ease.

Version 2.1 introduced the following new features:

• NEW Strongspace drive type for easy connection to ExpanDrive's upcoming Strongspace online storage service.
• NEW All-new high-speed Amazon S3 connection engine that will drastically performance during transfers and while browsing.
• NEW Improvements to ACL handling with S3 - Access-control policies on existing files are now preserved through modifications, including renames.
• NEW Sequential polling in large directory structures to improve browsing performance in large trees
• NEW S3 Files now have an r/w extended attribute named "com.expandrive.s3fs.ContentType" allowing access to set MIME-Type.
• NEW Symbolic links are now emulated. When viewed in earlier versions of ExpanDrive, these will appear as empty directories; when viewed in other S3 browsers, they will appear as keys containing the link target.
• NEW [Experimental] If a file has not been assigned a MIME content type, then when it is written back to S3, a content-type is inferred from the file's contents and its filename. The result can be overridden using the extended attribute.
• NEW [Experimental] Experimental support for inheritable S3 ACLs on directory keys.
• CHANGED Improved stability against temporary network errors
• CHANGED Increased timeout for connection and slow operations
• CHANGED Updated logging interface
• CHANGED Updated to use Python 2.6.5 internally
• CHANGED Updates to German, Dutch and Lithuanian localizations
• CHANGED More robust handling of FTP servers with broken SSL implementations.
• FIXED Fixed issue where ExpanDrive would occasionally not notice unmounted drives.
• FIXED Fixed issue where ExpanDrive would not correctly clean-up its mount point.
• FIXED Fixed a rare issue which could cause a stall launching ExpanDrive on Snow Leopard
• FIXED Fixed a rare issue that could prevent a password from correctly being saved
• FIXED Fixed an issue that could prevent automatic updates from being noticed
• FIXED Several fixes to the FTP directory-listing parser.

Version 2.1.1 makes the following additional changes:

• FIXED Fixed issue that caused FTP drives to fail connecting in 2.1.0.