Transmit is a veteran FTP application for the Mac. So veteran, you can still download a version of it for Mac OS 9 if you want to.
In a market so crammed with competitors, what makes this particular FTP app stand out from all others? Let me count the ways…
Transmit looks amazing. I know looks aren’t everything, but if I ever had to introduce someone to the joys of FTP, I’d rather do it with Transmit than anything else. It has the shiny friendliness you expect to see from Panic Inc, but not so shiny and so friendly that it lacks professionalism. Packed inside this friendly wrapper are loads of useful features, making Transmit suitable for everyone, be they an amateur who just uses FTP to update a website once a month, or a professional who is doing two-way transfers and multiple syncs no a daily basis.
Here are a few of my favorite Transmit features:
- It supports disclosure triangles and Finder colors in folder views; so the view of your stuff looks just like the view you’re using to seeing in the Finder
- Syncing a local folder with a remote folder is fast and worry-free thanks to the step-by-step guide that takes you through it, and the sync preview that shows you what will happen before it actually happens (and has saved me from disaster on several occasions)
- Support for Amazon S3 and WebDAV
- Easy file navigation with one-click Path Bar buttons
- It comes with Automator actions which you can use to create your own apps and scripts
And those are just a few of the great things buried inside Transmit. There are many other FTP applications, and some of them are free (Cyberduck deserves an honourable mention here), but for the price (just $34), Transmit offers excellent value for money and it worth buying for anyone who spends a lot of time transferring files from one place to another.
