MacHiest is offering $20 for several pieces of software, this week, and I’ve been trying out the site editor. It actually makes sense and produces decent code from a basic template!
And there are several other programs with it. Two of them, the game and the web editor, will only be unlocked if they sell 50k bundles. It looks like they’re 2/5 the way there and it’s been about 26 hrs since release.
I wasn’t seeing any post about this anywhere, so I thought I’d give y’all a heads-up in case you’re interested.
If you’re into journaling, MacJournal is one of the best apps on the market for that. It also does an adequate job managing blog postings, which is why I’m thinking of joining this heist. Since it sells for $40 and this heist is $20, you’re getting it for half-price with all the other apps coming for free.
Even if you’re not into “a day in my life” sort of journaling, you might find MacJournal as a useful grab-bag for assorted ideas, links and information you might want to use later. Dump everything you might forget there.
If you’d like a relatively easy way to manage a website that looks like you want it to look, RapidWeaver is an even better deal, since it retails for $79. I use it to manage my InklingBooks.com. If that’s your reason, you might want to wait until near the end to make sure there are enough sales to unlock it.
Just keep in mind that this heist is a short one. Their counter says only four days are left, so it’ll be gone by the middle of next week. Also one-quarter your payment goes to some good charities.
I tried the flow demo, and unless your FTP needs are extremely basic, it would be a waste of money to get it for that. My red flag thing goes off whenever I see marketing that revolves around trashing the competition for not having popped up yesterday. They seem incredulous that software can be well evolved and that there is actually a virtue in having something that has been developed for a decade or even longer. By their logic, a pixel pushing program with a slick “Mac interface” must surely be better than that creaky old Photoshop which has been around since the '80s.
I, too, noticed Flow bashing Transmit for being around since System 8. It seemed pretty silly to me; “They’ve been around long enough to build up a great featureset and iron out almost all bugs! They suck!” How does it compare to something free, such as Cyber Duck?
CyberDuck is not bad at all. I haven’t used it for years, and the only thing I remember griping about it was instability. It would crash every once in a while, but that isn’t really a big deal for an FTP application. It will certainly match Flow and exceed it in features and is really more comparable to Transmit or YummyFTP, except in stability.
I just bundle-upped. I want to try the Journal thing - it looks like fun.
Not interested in the FTP program though. I use Filezilla. I’ve tried Transmit (slow, times out, non-intuitive defaults), CyberDuck and Yummy but none did much for me. Filezilla is my weapon of choice nowadays.
I haven’t used Fetch since System 8! It must be awful. I think most of the “main” FTP applications for the Mac are pretty much at a state of feature parity these days. They all support droplets (which I find very useful for co-workers), integrated file editing, pseudo-QuickLook, the major secure protocols, automation, mirroring, and a bunch of other stuff I’m probably not thinking of. It seems to come down more to interface familiarity or preference. If you already have a favourite, there’s probably no good reason to switch.
I’ve used Transmit for years without problems and still have it, but these days mostly use ForkLift. It’s now very stable for me, is very full featured, including what seems like proper Quicklook. It also has the advantage over Transmit in that you can use it to move files around on your system. And as a bonus, perhaps, it has app deletion which looks for associated files like Preference files, so you don’t get so loaded down with orphans. I like the interface too.
On the other hand, my wife needed ftp software, so I put her on to CyberDuck and she was perfectly happy with that, though now her limited needs for moving files to where a colleague can get them is satisfied by a shared folder on DropBox.
I’m not interested in this bundle; I already have Rapid Weaver and have tried MacJournal, and given what has been posted here in terms of comments on Flow, I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole, on principle … even if I needed an ftp app.
On someone’s advice here (let’s blame Amber), I bought and still use Yummy FTP. It’s fast, dependable, and versatile. I like the two-pane interface, which mirrors the remote server and my own Finder. Does both FTP and SFTP. Mostly I copy files to a nearby campus server, but once I copied a multi-gig web site to Oregon, in just a few minutes. Yes, it has a goofy name, but Yummy is a great bargain at $28. yummysoftware.com/ (PS: CyberDuck is donation ware, not free.)
Yes, I am probably to blame for that, and in fact I think I remember recommending it. At the time, it was the most advanced of the lot, but the rest have caught up. I still think it has the easiest interface for multi-level bookmarking. By that I mean not only bookmarking the server, login credentials and such, but also places within the server as well. I have to keep track of about a dozen servers, and probably two dozen places within those servers. Two pane is also very keyboard friendly. Tab and Cmd-T can go a long way in both directions. Also folder shepherds are nice. I can save one of those onto the local file server for a project, then co-workers can drop files into that location and everything automatically ends up where it should; gets updated when they edit them. It’s almost like DropBox for FTP.
Fetch doesn’t do Amazon S3 uploads (unless I’m missing it), so I could do with a new FTP app. I ought to separate this into a separate thread, but given that I mainly just need to upload files to the site and to Amazon S3 (for the main install file), what’s a good choice?
I think Transmit and ForkLift are the two which currently support Amazon S3. Transmit is probably the better choice out of those two. Yummy has S3 support on the table, but he hasn’t been able to get to coding it yet, and is working on the WebDAV implementation first.
there’s someone in the Forum people with experience in using Rapidweaver? I already own Macjournal, I suppose having no need for Clips (PTH Pasteboard works well for me), I’m not interested in RipIt, Flow CoverScout etc, so, perhaps the bargain could be Rapidweaver - I’ve no experience in creating websites, so I need a very user friendly SW : do you think Rapidweaver could be a good choice?
Let’s put it this way: I have NEVER liked any code-for-you program, always choosing to code by hand instead because I didn’t understand the programs and hated the code they produced…
UNTIL I started playing with RapidWeaver.
I’m loving it! I’m actually in the process of using it to revamp my site. (No code uploaded yet; I’m preparing everything on the comp first.)
EDIT: I didn’t expect to like Clips, either, and I’m surprised by how much I’m already lamenting that I don’t have it on my (Window) computer at work.
Clips is a pretty good implementation. In fact, if I didn’t need some of the stuff PTH offers, I’d probably be using it as well. As it stands, I use PTH not only as a clip holder, but a macro engine too. The URL shortening, HTML entity (de)coding, and rewrapping features are a huge time-saver. There are lots of things that do these tasks on text that is already in a document, but PTH lets you paste things exactly as you want them to appear in one shot. It comes with a large quantity of filters built-in, but anyone that can throw together a shell script, or any other interpretive language script, can extend it to do just about anything imaginable.
RapidWeaver is indeed pretty cool. If you want to make a website or blog, and don’t know the first thing about HTML or how to structure things, it’s one of the best ways to go about it. It produces very clean code, and the interface for doing so is nice as well. The 40-some-odd built-in templates are well done, and if you aren’t picky you can probably just do with one of them. Another demographic I think it could appeal to is the person that does know HTML, but doesn’t want to bother with the details. A person like that might create their own RW template, even some plug-ins, and then let the application handle the dirty work. Its extensive SDKs let you dig in to the functional aspects of it quite easily, making this a tool not just for those who have no desire to learn code in order to publish.
I think most of the “main” FTP applications for the Mac are pretty much at a state of feature parity these days. They all support droplets (which I find very useful for co-workers), integrated file editing, pseudo-QuickLook, the major secure protocols, automation, mirroring, and a bunch of other stuff I’m probably not thinking of. It seems to come down more to interface familiarity or preference. If you already have a favourite, there’s probably no good reason to switch.