MountMate, the App You Didn't Know You Needed, Gets Updates

One of the things I treasure most about being part of the community that includes independent Mac developers is the opportunity to make feature requests. I never cease to be amazed when an app I use and love gets updated to include an idea I suggested. Yesterday, for the second time, the developer of MountMate (Homie Lab) responded to a feature request within hours. Back in June, he added Intel compatibility, and yesterday he added hotkey support so that MountMate can now be used in automation workflows like Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, and Apple Shortcuts.
Additional new features include:

• Dynamic Menu Bar Icon: The menu bar icon now changes to indicate app state:
  • Shows a clock badge while mounting/unmounting drives
  • Shows a warning badge if an error occurs
  • Returns to normal when operations complete
• Better Mount/Unmount Icons: Changed mount/unmount button icons from arrows to plus/minus for clearer meaning.

MountMate is a menu bar app that offers levels of control over external drives through a GUI that simply aren’t included in macOS without resorting to shell commands. It includes a switch that prevents the automated mounting of connected USB drives at login, which is useful if you prefer to connect drives manually. You can selectively include or exclude specific drives from this rule, a handy option if you use a USB drive for Time Machine. I used to plug in external drives and just leave them mounted, but over time I found that doing so could cause slowdowns and occasional problems, particularly with Finder extensions. These days I prefer to keep drives unmounted unless I have a specific reason to use them. With MountMate, if you have drives that contain multiple partitions, you can selectively mount only the ones you need instead of mounting everything. Now that hotkeys are available, it’s simple to create a shortcut that mounts a drive, launches an application, and then unmounts the drive after the file operation is complete. You could simplify things even further by scheduling the drive to mount at a specific time of day, running the file operations you need, and then scheduling the drive to unmount a couple of hours later. During the time it’s mounted, you can use whatever apps you like to read from or write to it. I use Sync Folders Pro, FreeFileSync, Smart Backup, and other similar apps to copy files automatically when certain conditions occur on my Mac. Although MountMate is primarily designed for external USB drives, it also includes the ability to mount network drives at login if you routinely connect to other computers on your network. Best of all, MountMate is donationware.