Since the early days of Mac OS X, the Finder has offered support for FTP, letting you work with FTP servers in the Finder as if they were any other file server. You just open the Connect To Server dialog (Go: Connect To Server) and enter the server info in the format ftp://username:password@server.

Except that it doesn't work. Never has. You may be able to connect to a server and copy files from it to your computer, but that's it--you can't copy files to the server, you can't move files around on the server, and you can't rename files on the server. The Finder's FTP functionality is read-only (and, as many Mac users will tell you, you're lucky if you can get that far). Not to mention that the Finder doesn't support SFTP--an alternative to FTP that you really want to be using if you care about the security of your file transfers--at all.

Because of this, Mac users who frequently access FTP and SFTP servers have generally turned to dedicated FTP clients such as the excellent Transmit or the free Cyberduck. But an appealing alternative is Magnetk's ExpanDrive, which gives the Finder itself the FTP/SFTP capabilities Mac users have long wanted.

To perform this magic, ExpanDrive takes advantage of MacFUSE, a Mac version of FUSE (Filesystem in User Space), which lets you, as the developer puts it, "implement a very functional file system in a normal program rather than requiring a complex addition to the operating system." This means that once you've installed MacFUSE, you can implement support for a new filesystem--such as FTP or SFTP--within a Mac OS X user account by simply running a standard, non-administrative program. A program such as, say, ExpanDrive.

The only time you'll notice these MacFUSE underpinnings is the first time you launch ExpanDrive: You'll see a dialog asking for permission to install the latest version of MacFUSE; if you have a previous version installed, you'll instead be asked to upgrade to the latest version. (While ExpanDrive can be run from a standard user account, installing or updating MacFUSE requires an administrator account.) Once that task is successful, ExpanDrive can be used by any account on your Mac.

ExpanDrive is mostly invisible while running, performing its tasks behind the scenes. Its only real interface is a pair of settings windows, accessed via a small menu-bar menu. The preferences window contains a few minor settings, but the Drive Manager is where all the action is: This is where you configure each FTP and SFTP server you want to access. Click on New Drive, choose the drive type (FTP or SFTP), and then enter the necessary connection information; if you want to connect to the server automatically whenever you log in, enable that option. Click on Connect to connect immediately, or Save And Close to save the info for later; in either case, your drive will appear in the Drive Manager list and the menu.

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