Product Reviews

The Web and email are the two mainstays of the Internet, but FTP (File Transfer Protocol) works behind the scenes to keep much of it alive and updated. Transmit makes FTP as easy as it can be, and new features in version 2.1 integrate many of the tools FTP users need without bloating the program.

Despite the fact that Panic has completely rewritten Transmit 2.1 for Mac OS X, long-time users of the product will find the two-pane interface familiar. By default, Transmit shows local Your Stuff on the left and remote Their Stuff on the right. Connecting to an FTP site is relatively straightforward, and Transmit makes it easy to add any site to the Favorites list.

New to this version is the Favorites Editor, which shows all the values of each Favorite, and local folders can be associated with each one. For Web designers who work on multiple sites, this is a great timesaver and is useful for anyone who regularly downloads from different sites to different locations on their hard drive.

Also new are the Path Shortcuts. These are saved in local or remote paths so you can quickly jump to your most commonly used folders. Transmit now supports secure and encrypted FTP connections through SFTP/SSH, increasing the number and type of servers it can connect to.

Life's a drag

Once you're connected to the remote server, Transmit provides you with many ways to work. Uploaded and downloaded files can be easily moved by dragging and dropping them between the two panes. You can also drag and drop to and from the Finder. This isn't limited to uploads and downloads; you can also move local files. In fact, Transmit's integration with the Finder is very tight: the methods are the same for renaming files, viewing Get Info, showing a preview and deleting a file. Keyboard commands and modifiers are also similar.

To determine which files you want to transfer to the server, you can preview files

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in a Preview Drawer. For text files, it will show you the plain text (HTML, if appropriate), and for graphic files, it will display the image along with information about its pixel size. You can also open and edit text files directly in Transmit, perform a spell check and search or replace. For files on remote sites, the changed file is uploaded when you save, replacing the original.

Admittedly, this feature won't replace a powerful text editing tool, such as BBEdit, but it's a very convenient way to make quick changes to HTML and server configuration files, instead of downloading, opening in a text editor, saving and re-uploading.

One of the most popular features in Transmit is folder synchronisation. Instead of trying to determine which files need to be updated one by one, Transmit can do this for you automatically. You can have it Update, where older files are replaced by newer ones, or Mirror, where older files are replaced by newer files and files that don't exist in the source directory are removed from the destination. Like anything else in Transmit, Synchronize can go in either direction. New to this version is the ability to specify a time offset, so Synchronize won't get confused by a difference in time zone from your machine to the remote server.

Transmit has always had the ability to connect to multiple servers at the same time. Now it can connect to the same server multiple times. This allows you to navigate the site while a transfer is occurring, and queue additional transfers. The extra transfers appear in a Queue drawer to show their progress and status.

Night shift

If you need to run several transfers overnight, or while you're away from your computer, Transmit sports a Batch Download feature. Once the Batch Download window is opened, files to be downloaded from multiple locations can be dragged and dropped on to it. The downloads will ony start when the Start button in the Batch Download window is pressed.

The one problem with Transmit 2.0 was a measure of instability, particularly when things aren't going well. There were times when the program would crash when there was a difficulty connecting to a remote server. Several files caused Transmit to stall when the Preview drawer was open, but upon attempting to view them again, they previewed fine.

However, version 2.1 has fixed these and if you use FTP in OS X, Transmit is the best, and most Mac-like, tool you'll find. Both the upgrade and new user prices are well worth it.