


- Expandrive cant play media mac os x#
- Expandrive cant play media mac os#
- Expandrive cant play media windows#
I’ve never seen anything like it for the Mac.
Expandrive cant play media windows#
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. 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. 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.
Expandrive cant play media mac os#
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. ExpanDrive’s low latency and reliability put. 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 cant play media 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. Spotlight, on the other hand, seems to know not to attempt to index ExpanDrive volumes.

DS_Store problem is a known issue, and Magnetk developer Jeff Mancuso says a fix is planned for a future release. User Interface NotesĮxpanDrive is an application, and it must be running in order to mount volumes via SFTP. 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. 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. The green circle in the list indicates a drive that is currently mounted. 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. 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 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”. Worse, when you delete a drive, you’re not prompted to confirm and can’t undo the deletion. “Connect” should use Command-K, and “Delete” should use Command-Delete - both of which shortcuts would parallel those of the Finder. The Save button is positioned at a seemingly random position. The group box surrounding the checkboxes is entirely needless. 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. (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. Lastly, if you attempt to quit ExpanDrive while drives are still mounted, you get this dialog, which could serve as the poster child for the Don’t Use “Yes” and “No” as Button Names campaign: EXPANDRIVE REGISTRY CHANGE WINDOWS The buttons are named “Yes” and “No” but the dialog doesn’t even ask a question. Action verbs almost always make for better button names than “Yes” and “No”.
