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A suggestion for ExpanDrive: instead of a green light in the Drive Manager, I'd like to see an Eject button, similar to how a mounted volume appears in the Finder Sidebar. I'd also like configurable view options so I can display other columns of information (eg, server, path, username). And finally, a standard OS X configurable window toolbar.

Sometimes when I create a TextMate Project with files located on an ExpanDrive disk, TextMate seems to lose the ability to see those files. The filenames come up red in the file list, even when the disk is mounted and I can see the files right there in the Finder. Here is how to fix the problem. (I apologize for any technical errors in this explanation)

ExpanDrive seems to create a directory in "Volumes" with the same name as the drive you are mounting, and deletes it when the drive is unmounted. The problem occurs when, for some reason or another, that directory is not deleted when the drive is unmounted. If that happens, the next time you mount the drive called. say "test", it will instead create a directory "test 1". the "1" is invisible in most of the system--in the finder, for example--but you can see if in the shell in the directory "Volumes". TextMate still looks for the files in "test" and cannot find them in "test 1", and thus the links to the files are lost along with the organization in the project.

The Solution is to go into volumes and manually delete the directory "test" which should have been deleted in the first place. I first had to delete the hidden subdirectory ".Trashes" first--perhaps the presence of this subdirectory prevented the "test" directory from being deleted in the first place. Then when you mount the "test" drive, it will have the correct name, and TextMate will be able to find the files again.

As for why the ".Trashes" subdirectory was there, I suspect it is related to deleting files through the TextMate interface. When you delete an Expandrive file in the Finder, you are warned that the file will be deleted immediately. When you do so through TextMate, it claims to move the file to the Trash. Perhaps Textmate improperly moved the file to a .Trashes directory that should not exist.

One last thing--if this bug is fixed, I think it would be best if the fix focused on not making new "ghost" directories, rather than removing existing "ghost" directories. For example, my main project now resides in a directory called "drivename 2". If the old directories were deleted, I, and I'm sure others, would lose their projects upon upgrading to the fixed ExpanDrive.

The filter box in the drive manager window is useful. However, it would be even more useful (and intuitive) if it had a standard keyboard shortcut to highlight it, like cmd-f or cmd-opt-f.