Expandrive vs transmit for mac os#
Expandrive vs transmit mac os x#
Expandrive vs transmit windows#

Expandrive vs transmit windows#

(As should the cutesy option to disable “Superfluous visual effects”, which effects, so far as I can tell, are to fade ExpanDrive’s own windows in and out when they open and close.) (One might assume that if you don’t click Save, but simply close the window, changes are discarded, but that’s not the case.) The Save button and group box should be removed. And there’s no reason for both a Save button and regular window close button if both do the same thing, which, in this case, they do. The group box surrounding the checkboxes is entirely needless.

The Save button is positioned at a seemingly random position. “Connect” should use Command-K, and “Delete” should use Command-Delete - both of which shortcuts would parallel those of the Finder. Worse, when you delete a drive, you’re not prompted to confirm and can’t undo the deletion. The command keys are wrong: Command-C should never be used for anything other than Copy, and Command-D is a reasonable guess (from a user’s perspective) for “Duplicate”, but in ExpanDrive it’s mapped to “Delete”. Those icons in the context menu are unnecessary they’re distracting rather than helpful, and the whole idea of putting small icons next to every menu item feels Windows-y.

The trick is that ExpanDrive only allows you to edit the settings of drives that aren’t currently mounted - and only shows that it’s even possible to do so when the drive is not mounted: For a mounted volume, the only items in the contextual menu are “Open in Finder” and “Unmount”: One thing that wasn’t obvious to me is how you edit the settings of a saved drive. The green circle in the list indicates a drive that is currently mounted. The main interface is decidedly minimal: a single window listing your saved “drives” (which are more or less equivalent to bookmarks in a typical file transfer app) and three buttons: “New Drive”, a contextual menu, and help. Instead it appears as a system-wide menu bar item: However, it’s a UIElement application - it does not appear in your Dock and doesn’t have a menu bar. User Interface NotesĮxpanDrive is an application, and it must be running in order to mount volumes via SFTP. DS_Store problem is a known issue, and Magnetk developer Jeff Mancuso says a fix is planned for a future release. Spotlight, on the other hand, seems to know not to attempt to index ExpanDrive volumes.

Expandrive vs transmit mac os x#

You can’t use the hidden Desktop Services defaults preference to suppress them, because ExpanDrive’s volumes are treated by Mac OS X as local drives, not network shares, and that preference only applies to network shares. ExpanDrive even works well when you change networks - you can mount a volume, put your laptop to sleep, then wake it up on a different Wi-Fi network and the mounted SFTP volume continues to work as though nothing had changed.ĮxpanDrive is not perfect, but the only significant downside I’ve encountered is that, because servers mounted via ExpanDrive are treated like first-class volumes by Mac OS X, you wind up with “.DS_Store” files on the remote volume. ExpanDrive’s low latency and reliability put. That’s always been a huge annoyance for me using the remote file editing features in standalone file transfer apps.Īs a remote network protocol, it works better in the Finder than anything I’ve ever used on Mac OS X - far more responsive than WebDAV or AFP, both of which, for me, have always been one-way tickets to Beachball City. If you open remote files checked out of an SVN (or other revision control system) repository, you can use the built-in SVN commands in BBEdit or TextMate, just as though the files were part of a repository checked out on your local drive.

You don’t have to worry about uploading or downloading, it works more like a USB flash drive - you just save and open files directly. Magnetk, the company behind ExpanDrive, has a similar product for Windows called SftpDrive that’s been around for a while.įor many typical tasks, ExpanDrive is far more convenient and seamless than a standalone client like Interarchy or Transmit. I’ve never seen anything like it for the Mac. I’ve been using ExpanDrive for a week and it is extremely impressive.

Expandrive vs transmit for mac os#

ExpanDrive 1.01 is a new $29 file system extension for Mac OS X, based in part on MacFUSE, 1 that lets you mount SFTP servers as volumes in the Finder.