Yeah, their “Rip-off Express” page is hilarious:
panic.com/extras/ripoff/
Eh, I wasn’t attacking Transmit or anything. I believe my original comment is that one should try them both because they appeal to different demographics. Because Transmit is in fact so much like the Finder is a big strike against it in my book. The flakiness I encountered was its inability to do long sustained transfers. A co-worker of mine was a big Transmit fan, but nearly every time she had to do a large upload, she’d ask me to do it because Transmit could never handle multi-hour hundred+ file uploads. It also had problems “sticking” permission changes and such. So, you have your experience and I have mine. It probably does come down to what you need FTP for; which again is why I encouraged testing both. I don’t find Finder easy to use either, because it requires contortions to do advanced things (and by “advanced” I mean things as basic as inverting a selection, selecting by query, non-additive searching, looking at hidden files and so on).
Oh, and YummyFTP had droplets way before Transmit did. They developed the droplet as an answer to the widget because it could only handle single-file uploads, where as a droplet can handle hundreds; additionally, I can save out a droplet for my non-FTP savvy colleagues and they can upload to the correct location without even having a demo copy of Yummy on their drives. Growl support? Copied. I’m not sure what you mean by routing (if you mean folder watching, I’m afraid Yummy had that first too–I don’t even see where you can do anything like that in Transmit), but I’m sure nearly everyone is “guilty” of copying. It really doesn’t mean much in the end, except that eventually the interface is everything, and that part will always be a mixture of subjective appeal and prior experience.
I think anyone on the lookout for an FTP application should start with CyberDuck. If it is good enough for them, then great. It is free, and quite easy to use. If you need a bit more; there are plenty of great alternatives.
I know; hence the smiley 
That was my point, yeah. Although the “long, sustained file transfer” bit I find very odd, as that’s exactly the sort of thing I love Transmit for. I regularly up/download entire folders full of multi-MB files for comics, leaving it overnight, and Transmit handles such transfers beautifully.
Are you really sure about that? Because I have v1.5.2, from Oct 2006, and they’re not present. Transmit has had them for about two years.
OK, that’s pretty cool. Didn’t know it could do that.
Absolutely, which is why I made the point. Everyone copies from someone at some stage 
Hmmm. I’m only going off of what my memory serves. I was positive that my first version was 1.5.2 as well, and that it included them. Perhaps it was 1.5.3 where I started? What I do remember is comparing the two applications when I made my choice back then, and Transmit did not have them. Perhaps I just couldn’t find them. It was one of the big factors between the two that made me side with Yummy, because like I said, I can integrate those droplets with LaunchBar and rarely even touch the full client for most operations. Folder watching and synchronised scrolling between two directories were the other big things. That, and I had a coupon that brought the cost down to $15.
The stability issues I noticed were definitely not universal. It depended a lot on the server technology, and in some cases the technology. Where Transmit would work flawlessly sometimes and like a prototype other times, CyberDuck had no issues, nor did NCFTP. These stability issues have been noted by quite a few others, and it seems to be most common complaint against Transmit.
Oh, and I apologise for my tone in the prior post. I was feeling a little punchy thanks to the iPhone thread, oh yes, and I had to do an emergency restore of my system last night. Argh. I was hoping that I could put off that unrecoverable disk error until Leopard came out, but everything started collapsing so a full disk format and re-install it was. Fun fun.
That’s exactly my experience too. I also don’t understand why it’s so slow - I’d have to say in the limited use I’ve had so far, Yummy is much, much quicker. I’ll be trying some of the others mentioned here as well too.
And I don’t think I’ll ever recover from the time I used Transmit to upgrade a complicated website. It didn’t update the folders, it completely overwrote them (to the point where if a folder wasn’t in the upgrade patch, it was deleted). Now I can see where that behavior may be a feature, but NOT the default behavior. I had to contact support to find out how to make it work “normally” but I’ve never again used it for proper site management, I still use the ever more despised PC “Ted” for all substantial FTPing. It’s quick, it doesn’t do weird thing to file permissions and it doesn’t stop until its finished.
I have three sites to which I regularly upload: my own domain; my .Mac account; and ftp space on the Xiamen University server.
Materials for students go on the university server and on .Mac … if the students are on the campus network – part of the national education net – the university server is very much faster, but for a long time it was quicker for anyone living off-campus and using the public net as opposed to the education net, to get stuff from .Mac as the gateway between the two networks was horribly slow; for me, I had to go to a faculty building with a wireless network to upload.
Apart from stuff for students, I use .Mac for back-ups of important documents etc.
My own domain has my photo-galleries, and had a web-site about Xiamen and my life here … I managed to lose the web-site when changing IP, 'cos I thought I had a local version, but it turned out that for some reason I didn’t, and I haven’t had time to rebuild it from scratch! We changed IP as changes and take-overs rendered that IP virtually useless and incredibly slow anyway, and when the cost went through the roof, that was it. Our current IP is fast, cheap and helpful.
When I first started using Transmit, I admit that I did have problems uploading files, but that was clearly down to the network. Whatever other FTP systems I tried would all hang on large transfers. With the current version of Transmit, all runs smoothly, and, it seems to me quickly … as quickly as Speed Download in terms of uploads.
But in view of this discussion, I thought I would have a look at YummyFTP and ForkLift. I can’t use either of them, as neither of them will upload to a WebDAV server, which I need for .Mac and uploading to .Mac through the finder is dead slow … at least from here.
Furthermore, neither of them will log on to my Xiamen University FTP space, with the server refusing my user name and/or password. I have never had that problem with Transmit.
In terms of UI, I dislike Yummy … it seems cluttered and the icons are distinctly ugly. ForkLift is better. I’ll be getting rid of Yummy … it does nothing for me. I like the idea of ForkLift as it will handle file operations at local level too and I can see that providing a better work flow, and I guess I might eventually find out how to coax it into logging on to the university server. But I think the Devs of ForkLift are mean in terms of giving you only 15 days trial period, and I guess it’s a consecutive 15 days too.
So we’ll see. But I thought that in view of the discussion here, I’d give things a whirl, rather than just sitting on my hands saying “Transmit is best”.
Mark
I used versions of Interarchy for years, until Transmit moved it to my old iMac. Interarchy 8.5.x is a fine FTP client, but Transmit is better, IMO.
No apology necessary. I’ve been around on the Electric Interweb long enough (ah, the days of 9600 baud…) not to take any of it too much to heart, and I’m guilty of the occasional ‘redirected snippiness’ myself more often than I’d like
Andreas, if you only need FTP and not SFTP, RBrowser is free, and works very well:
Paolo
Regarding Transmit and Cyberduck, my own recent experience: I was using Cyberduck very happily (with the exception of a long “broken pipe” period) until recently when suddenly it just stopped connecting to my sites.
Transmit, on the other hand, opened instantly. When this situation persisted for a while, I just bit my lip and paid the $30.
Sometimes it seems hard to justify saving that kind of money and putting up with continued frustration.
A second vote for Fetch. I tried Cyberduck a few years ago but found it rather slow. (I think there was a speed test of FTP clients on one of the general Mac websites a couple of years ago, and all the commercial apps were similar in speed but Cyberduck was quite a bit slower.)
Fetch has been totally reliable for me. You can get a free licence if you are in education or a charity (see http://fetchsoftworks.com/Licensing/), so I’ve been using it for free for years. I’ll buy a licence when I leave university, though, because it has been invaluable.
The little running dog cursor is fun, and useful: he runs to the left when connecting or downloading and to the right when uploading. One other thing I like about Fetch is that it supports the old standard Command-full stop for stopping a process midway. I wish more applications would do that.
As someone who mostly uses file transfers just to drop one or two files on a server or browse it, I’m really impressed with MacFusion at version 1.0. This is a program that uses Google’s FUSE / MacFUSE to mount remote file systems via SSH (or FTP, though I’m not sure the advantage of that over the built-in FTP support in the Finder…)
YMMV,
Bryce
The Finder’s FTP is read-only.
I’ve just done a very quick, extremely amateur, comparison of Transmit vs ForkLift in terms of speed for uploading. I had a 150MB file I needed to upload, and as I knew it was going to take a long time, I set it to happen overnight.
I started sending it using ForkLift, waiting long enough until it settled down to a pretty constant speed after a few minutes … round about 8KB/sec on a 1MB broadband line … slower than I usually get if I’m uploading to either my university space or .mac using Transmit, but ForkLift won’t access either of those. I then cancelled that upload.
I shut down ForkLift, opened Transmit, deleted the partial file on the web space and restarted the upload. It soon settled down to the same 8KB/sec. So I left it running and went to bed.
This morning when I got up, I was dismayed to find an alert from Transmit, saying the upload had failed with no restart possible … oh no! All those hours wasted! So I shut down Transmit, and opened ForkLift to see what it showed on the webspace. There was the file, 150.10 MB as it should be … so I clicked the button to get a preview.
I liked the fact that a little “Download process” pane came up showing the state of the download, speed of download and estimated time. It settled down to around 70KB/sec which I found really impressive … I might try downloading it with Speed Download at around the same time tomorrow morning to see how fast that would go in comparison.
The whole file was there without error and opened up appropriately as soon as the download finished. So the Transmit error message was actually a false message and there was no error. I’ll contact Panic about that.
I still prefer the Transmit UI, though the differences are small, and I will need to continue to use Transmit to work with the university space and .mac.
On the other hand, I like ForkLift’s local file management abilities a lot … two panes on the local file-system rather than having to open up two finder windows is good. And I have found its ability to delete apps and their various associated files useful as well. So I’ll probably buy it to enjoy those benefits.
What I’m not so keen on is that, if you do anything else while ForkLift is working, that useful little progress pane is sent right to the back, hidden behind all the other windows, including ForkLift’s own main window – which it was previously on top of – and one has to go through an irritating, hiding/moving windows process to find it again. A nuisance, but not a total deal-breaker.
Just thought I’d report back.
Mark
Mark:
You should submit a feature request to the ForkLift developers to possibly have the information window float above other windows. The developers are pretty responsive and it does sound like a good idea. I think ForkLift is a steal if you don’t already own Transmit and Appzapper b/c you get the functionality of these apps with one app.
Thanks, Robert. I had also thought it might be worth contacting the ForkLift devs about the progress window.
For the rest, as it happens, I have owned and used Transmit for a number of years, though not AppZapper. Also, as I said in my earlier post, the real problem with ForkLift is that my ftp space on the university server here won’t accept my login name and password through ForkLift, and it won’t work with WebDAV, so .mac, one of my other most frequent upload sites is also unavailable with it … Transmit works well with both.
But I’m still thinking about ForkLift, because as I said, I like the ability to use it for local file operations.
Cheers
Mark