ExpanDrive expands my horizons
I’ve been pretty quite about ExpanDrive despite my HEAVY usage of it over the last week. I kept quiet simply because I really wanted to drill this one to death before getting behind something with this kind of power.
For those looking for a way to best describe ExpanDrive, it’s like iDisk without a .Mac account, it’s like Jungle Disk without the transfer rate$, it’s WebDAV without jenky WebDAV protocol (can’t pass many programming commands since WebDAV uses those same commands) or it’s like an external Firewire or USB drive that you access anywhere with physically carrying an hard drive around… ExpanDrive brings mounted disk functionality to remote storage locations.
Like I said, I have been driving this thing to wall since I got it last week, and yes it gets a little shaggy at times (which could be to blame on the server or the ISP as much as the app itself) but overall, this is a must have app. I have been beating the snot out this doing web development from the Finder (or Path Finder, truth be told) once I need to move beyond local development yet not ready to go live. I have installed and run apps directly from ExpanDrive drives. I have used it for storage, a file server… the reality is, anything you use any mounted volume for you can use ExpanDrive.
It’s brilliant.
Be warned: I have found that when using it as a web development platform the odd edit I make to a remote file will suddenly render that file useless leaving me no option but to replace that file with a local copy (this happens most often with style sheets). I have yet to watch my console to really see what’s going on but when I find out, I’ll let you know.
