The new face of FTP

[hari]

On Friday ExtendMac released a new FTP client called Flow (US$29) and it's pretty sweet. Flow supports FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, .Mac, and local connections concurrently which means that you can have several transfer and editing sessions going on simultaneously.

Flow can also QuickLook just about any file — images, movies, music, PDFs, text, web-pages –  QuickLook is available in Forklift and YummyFTP. QuickLook makes an incredible amount of sense in FTP. It comes in handy when you're browsing a server directory full of images, for example.



Flow does things that other FTP clients do, but it does them in style. Code jockeys will love Flow's built-in editor with tabs, syntax coloring and a live preview. This saves time over downloading a file, opening it, editing it and FTPing it back to the server. Code Sense is also a boon. As you're writing HTML, CSS, or PHP, if you forgot the name of an element, property or function (respectively), hitting escape will bring up a list of suggestions to complete the code for you.

URL Copying is best described by Brian Amerige, the author:

    URL Copying is one of the benefits you get from providing a bookmark with what we call Base URL information. (more info on how to set it here). The basic scenario is that we've got all these remote files in Flow, and you can copy the web URL to them with a single click. you can even have it automatically copy the URL after you've uploaded.

    providing a base URL also allows the editor's livepreview functionality to resolve relative references (like "image.jpg" as opposed to a full path)

It's also easy to create FTP bookmarks (called "droplets") in Flow. Just drag a bookmark to your desktop. When you want to FTP a file to that location simply drop a file on its icon on the droplet. You can even copy URLs to remote files in Flow for easy distribution.

Flow is Leopard-only so it benefits from Core Animation and general Cocoa improvements like fast enumeration, which is fine with me but will present a problem for Tiger (10.4) users and earlier. Although Flow connects to a fully credentialed Mac.com user account without a problem it cannot connect to another Mac.com user's public folder – although I understand that this feature will be addresses in a "very-soon release."

I've been a dyed-in-the-wool Transmit user forever, but Flow may bump it from my dock – as soon as public folder access fixed, that is.