Flow has been in the works since the days of OS X Tiger, but the freshly released version takes things up a notch with a slick UI and a feature set that takes advantage of the power of Leopard. Flow is an FTP client, a text editor with a useful live preview feature, and a bookmark generator for drag-and-drop uploading. Add tabbed navigation and phenomenal ease-of-use, and it's got everything we want out of a new Leopard app,
Flow does have some neat extras, but first and foremost, it's an FTP client. When we tested it, it smoothly handled multiple connections to FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and even the often-criticized .mac service. The only thing we would have changed about the interface: a "recent connections" button or menu item would be nice. The bookmark button in Flow is easy to find, but sometimes we just forget to use it. Speaking of bookmarks, Flow has a unique feature that lets you save any bookmark as a droplet - a tiny app that quickly uploads anything you drop on it, without even opening Flow itself.
Once you've got some files on the server, Flow really sets itself apart from other FTP apps. You can edit your html and css files on the fly, and watch the results in a live preview. This is amazingly powerful, and saves a lot of time when you just need to make a quick change. Forgot to close an html tag? Don't bother uploading a new copy of the file, just edit it in Flow! It even supports Quick Look, so you can preview images right on the server.
Mocha FTP Server is a nifty little application for Windows Mobile that will turn your PDA or phone into a FTP server. When the application is running, you can access any of the files on your mobile device by typing the device's IP address into a web browser or FTP client. That's pretty much all there is to it.
Once upon a time, it appears that Mocha FTP was a commercial application, but MochaSoft has released the utility as freeware. In order to register the software all you have to do is install the application, click the register button, and enter "freeware" for the license name and 111425 for the license code.
Have you ever needed to access an FTP site while using a friend or colleague's computer? In some cases you can just type the URL into Firefox or Internet Explorer, but life's always a lot easier when you're using a full featured FTP client, so your first impulse is probably to download and install a free client like Filezilla.
AnyClient presents another option. It's a browser-based FTP client that can be run from any computer with Java installed. Unlike FireFTP, which is a browser add-on that you need to install before running, you can fire up AnyClient just by visiting a web site.
You can choose to save profiles of sites you visit to your desktop if you want. But the beauty of AnyClient is that you can access it from anywhere. AnyClient supports FTP, FTPS, SFTP and WebDAV protocols. There's also a free cross-platform desktop version available for download.
DockDrop is a simple Mac OS X application that lets you easily and quickly upload files to an FTP, WebDAV, or SCP server, with added support for Flickr uploads.
When DockDrop is open, it resides quietly on your dock (hence the name). When you want to upload a file or folder, simply drop the item onto the Dockdrop icon (see again why the name is so apt?). Dockdrop will prompt you for the upload method of your choice, upload the file, and put a URL for your upload on the clipboard, ready for pasting into an email, chat program or website.
Dockdrop offers set-it-and-forget-it functionality: once you enter in your server credentials, Dockdrop will store the settings, so you won't have to enter them again.
One of the added bonuses of DockDrop (besides its simplicity and ease of use) is the Flickr integration. After a simple authentication process, you can drag and drop your images onto DockDrop and they upload seamlessly to your Flickr account.
Dockdrop is free, and requires an Intel Mac with 10.4 or 10.5.
It's been 3 years in the making, but FileZilla 3.0 has finally been released. There aren't a lot of new features in this excellent free FTP client. But the code base has been rewritten from the ground up. And here's the best thing. It's now cross-platform. FileZilla 3.0 runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
Because this is a total redesign, FileZilla 3 installs to a new default directory. That means you can install FileZilla 3 without uninstalling FileZilla 2. It also means that your settings will not automatically be imported, but there's an easy solution:
Select "Edit" from the menu
Click "Import"
Browse to your Filezilla 2 folder (probably in your Program Files directory).
Select the file titled FileZilla.xml. This is probably the only file you'll see anyway.
Now your site manager data including FTP sites and passwords should be imported. If you're a Windows user and haven't had a problem with FileZilla 2, there's probably not much reason to upgrade. The file transfer window has new tabs to display queued files, failed transfers, and successful transfers. And that's about it. But future development on FileZilla will likely focus on this version, so it might eventually be a good idea to upgrade.
We first metioned Cyberduck FTP here on Download Squad back in 2005, but it's worth revisiting. When you switch from Windows to a Mac, one of the first things you do is to try to find Mac equivalents to your Windows software. Smart FTP is a fantastic (and free for personal, educational and non-profit organizational use) FTP client on Windows. So what is there on the Mac?
It turns out that Cyberduck FTP is a fantastic and free FTP client available for OS X. Sporting a quirky name and a funky logo, Cyberduck does everything you might expect an FTP client to do. While it doesn't have a text editor built in, that's almost a blessing in disguise; it plays nice with a whole bunch of popular editors, so if you have one installed you can tell Cyberduck to use that editor in the preferences.
Cyberduck feels very Mac-ish, which makes it not only pleasant to use, but very easy to learn. It comes bundled with a dashboard widget, which is intended to give direct file dropping capabilities. Unfortunately, we were unable to get it working, but we'll keep at it because it's a great idea.
Panic, the fine folks that bring us Transmit, finally revealed the top secret app they've been developing over the past year with the release of the web development application Coda V1.0. This is not a WYSIWYG, drag-and-drop, do-all application. Coda has a specific target audience that consists of people who edit raw code using multiple tools such as a text editor, FTP client, CSS editor and Terminal.
Coda brings all these tools together in one neat interface. You can organize your files using Sites, edit with the text editor, utilize the built in preview functionality, style your pages with the CSS builder and even access Terminal with one click for those times you need to do a little MySQL or other Terminal task. You can make your changes locally then publish to the web, or edit the files directly on the server using the built in Transmit FTP engine. And as an added bonus, for those times you are stuck trying to remember syntax or learning something new, it also includes access to HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP reference books from within the interface.
After using Coda for a couple weeks it amazes me that this is just a version 1.0 release. Panic has released a 1.0.1 update, but it's hard for me to find anything to complain about. If you are a hand coder, you should definitely check out the 14 day free trial. Coda will retail for $99, but for a limited time it's available for $79. If you are a current owner of Transmit 3, knock another ten bucks off and it can be yours for $69. Sorry Windows users, Coda only runs on Mac OSX 10.4 and higher.
CrossFTP is a 2 pack of FTP goodness. As separated programs, they keep Firefox more stable and reliable for FTP tasks. It comes with an FTP client as well as a server application and only needs the latest version of JRE.
This one is very different to FireFTP because it can run as a standalone program. So, instead of opening up Firefox and going through the pull-down menus all the time, you can just visit your desktop for a quick double-click to FTP your heart away.
The default version is FREE, which provides full function general FTP tasks and local resource/archive browsing. The Pro version requires a license fee after a one month evaluation period, and includes multi-threading, secure transfers, and FXP file transfers.
Free-for-personal-use FTP client SmartFTP hit version 2.0 a couple weeks back and the new version has a number of
nice features. The biggest update in this release is its completely re-worked UI, which features docking panes and
tabbed local and remote directory browsers. The tabbed windows look like they'll make it easy to switch between
multiple open servers and local directories. The new version can be downloaded at the SmartFTP web site.
