Consumeroo

ExpanDrive is a lightweight utility that allows you to connect to remote SFTP servers right within Finder. Most of us feel that given OS X’s Unix architecture, this should have been something that OS X did out of the box, unfortunately it does not.

Installation was simple and unobtrusive. I Didn’t even need a restart. Once you’re up and running, connecting to a remote share is pretty straight forward. Enter your connection details:

And you’re off to the races.

There’s a handy “Drive Manager” that you can use to manage and connect to your drives that looks like this:

And also, in version 1.04 the ability to have your drives in the menu-bar drop-down. This I especially like.

The basics of opening a folder, dragging some files over and letting them crawl up to the server work perfectly as advertised. In reverse, downloading a file or folder works just as well too. Some of the benefits of ExpanDrive (taken from Magnetk) are the facts that it:

• Handles reconnecting with grace
• Has a “zero configuration” and just works
• Integrates seamlessly with Finder

These 3 points are practically enough to justify the $29.00 all on its own. One could say this is the holy grail of OS X -> Internet networking we’ve all been waiting for, and it mostly is.

Since I started writing this article, ExpanDrive has been updated twice, and on top of that when I went over to Magnetk’s forums to see why I was getting a certain error (this pesky -36 file copy error), I was politely greeted by Jeff Mancuso (who I believe to be the owner of Magnetk) saying my issues were not unique and it’s their number 1 issue to fix. Some of the issues I have had (which are most of the issues on their forums) are:

• This really annoying -36 file copy error when a disk has been idle
• Files don’t update in Finder very reliably

All in all, I think ExpanDrive is pretty fabulous. However, I think I will let a few more point versions be released before I feel comfortable using this as a true replacement for my current AFP setup. I have no doubt that by 1.05 or 1.06 my main issues will be fixed (which is a true testament to the attitude I am getting from Jeff) and I’ll be able to use ExpanDrive fulltime.

Last year I attempted to drive myself into bankruptcy by taking up photography as a hobby. Pretty much every aspect of photography can be made into a crucial spending decision. Unfortunately no amount of money spent can make you a better photographer, which is hopefully learned early on. After buying a digital SLR, a tripod and some lenses, I needed a better app than iPhoto or Picasa to manage and develop photos, especially since I would now be working with the much lauded RAW imagees.

At the time of my decision there were only three apps that seemed worth considering. Lightroom had recently come out of beta (along with an obnoxious Photoshop moniker), Apple was making the rounds with Aperture 1.5 and my father swore by Capture One (which now seems to be confusingly named Phase One Capture One 4).

I watched my father use Capture One but found the interface to be slow, unwieldy and decidedly un-Mac-like, regardless of how good it’s RAW processing was. A strange criticism, I know, but if I’m going to spend hours a day with an app, it needs to flow a certain way. I know I’m not alone here. Either way, it was off the table.

My poor 20″ white plastic iMac didn’t seem up to the task of running Aperture, with it’s monstrous system requirements and Apple’s continuous flaunting of it running across dual 30″ displays, so I decided to take Lightroom for a spin. It was love at first launch. The interface was completely novel, but felt strangely at home with its image-centric design. It made managing thousands of photos so easy I quickly unloaded more cash for a dedicated image drive and began shooting as much as I could.

Now, not quite a year later, Apple has [released Aperture 2.0][5a], with [100+ new features][5b] to brag about. Reading through the list and taking note of [my new hardware][5c] and [newer hardware][5d], I thought it was time to finally see what Aperture was capable of.

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It’s no secret that generally speaking, people are pretty happy with their iPhones. The 4.8 ounces that make up these are pretty awesome.

I recently updated my unlocked iPhone to firmware version 1.1.3, and realized something that I haven’t heard much rumbling about. It’s something small but in the big picture makes a huge difference. Since Apple is a computer company, an industry where software and hardware vendors race to new levels of technology every single day, and in a space where simple point releases bring whole new levels of functionality to existing and paid-for products, Apple is able to bring what would normally be a version 2.0 product from say, RIM, as a simple point release to the iPhone.

Let me elaborate. In the 2 years I had my BlackBerry, its OS very well may have been updated but I never did such thing. How about the Nokia you have sitting on your desk? Or that Motorola? Ever updated it? Didn’t think so. Yet here we are. All 3.5 million iPhone users updating our $400 MP3 phones so we can have Google Maps tell us where we are. Apple did what Apple does best–made a better than average product to begin with and then updated the crap out of it to be a much better than average product (in slightly unrelated news, you MacBook Air haters take note.)

That brings me to my second point which is, not only has Apple made this process easy and painless (most of us are using iTunes anyway) but they actually provide worthwhile upgrades at a pretty steady pace, and those upgrades are free. That’s that computer industry blood I was talking about earlier.

When you sit back and think about this for a moment, you’ll realize why Apple has so quickly gained market share in this sector. You’ll also realize that unless companies like Nokia, Motorola or dare I even say, RIM, get their acts together soon, they really will be casualties of the Smartphone war.

This is just neat.

Fluid creates what are called ’site specific browsers’ or SSBs, native to OS X. Just like Prism (the project Mozilla is working on), you point Fluid to a URL and it creates a completely native OS X application of that site or web app. A good example could be Gmail, or maybe Campfire. In my case, the first thing I did was try Helperoo. Look!

Neat!! While I can’t imagine this suiting everybody, it certainly helps if you are in the middle of writing an email, or maybe a Google Spreadsheet–should Safari crash, you’re safe from losing any unsaved edits. Plus, like the Fluid website points out, sometimes we lose ourselves in our 20+ tabs. Since it’s a completely native OS X application, you get all the benefits of our most beloved operating system. Webkit, native keyboard controls, beautiful text rendering etc… etc… There’s even a Flickr group dedicated to providing icons!

I always liked the premise behind Prism but always thought it was going to be executed rather poorly on OS X given the Mozilla Groups history (cough Firefox.) Guess I don’t have to worry anymore.

Part of setting up the new ‘Roo was to get a system that was easy for Tim and I to post. A lot of this had to do with the blogging system we chose and a lot of this had to do with the way we prepare content to post. Things like music, images and videos can be such a pain in the ass to prep, we both ended up simply not posting.

In the process of creating a bunch of scripts to easily (with one click!) take the selected song from iTunes and prepare it to go online (renames it, exports album art and uploads), I came across (what surely can’t be new) a way to get a DRM’d track exported to MP3 without much of a hassle or quality loss.

The magic happens with in an audio app I bought almost a year ago, Audio Hijack Pro. If you’re at all familiar with Audio Hijack Pro, you know exactly where I am headed with this. It’s simple. You just hijack your audio from iTunes and once you setup your format options (which for us is a 128kbps MP3) you just play the track once through iTunes. Audio Hijack Pro captures the digital stream right through OS X (I assume via Core Audio) so there is essentially no quality loss! Boom, boom and… boom.