When people ask for a recommendation for a good FTP client on Mac OS X, I usually recommend Panic's excellent Transmit. I've been using it since version 1, and have happily upgraded whenever a new major version comes along. But some people don't use FTP enough to justify Transmit's $30 price, even if it may be (arguably) the best FTP client for Mac OS X.
Some friends in the tech support world often recommend the free and open-source FileZilla, which offers a Mac OS X version in addition to Windows and Linux. But I've never been thrilled about its busy interface, which can be daunting for novice users. Yesterday the makers of Cyberduck, a free and open-source FTP client made just for Mac OS X, announced a major update to version 3.0, so I thought I would give it a shot.
The latest version of Cyberduck adds support for WebDAV servers and Amazon's S3 storage service to its support of FTP, SFTP, FTP/TLS, and SCP protocols. Version 3 also adds a feature to quickly open a file via its http URL in a web browser. And, extending Cyberduck's excellent Mac OS X integration—which includes support for Keychain, Spotlight, Bonjour, and iDisk—the latest version adds very slick integration with Leopard's Quick Look feature, allowing Quick Look to work with remote files.
Cyberduck uses a simple, Finder-esque one-window interface.
Unlike Transmit and other graphical FTP clients that usually use a two-pane interface, Cyberduck uses a single window view, which mimics a Finder window. Files can be dragged to another open Finder window in order to download it to a particular folder, or double-clicked to download it to the system-wide Downloads folder. Drag a file from your Mac to the window to upload it. Transfers are fast and worked without a hitch in my limited testing.
But Cyberduck isn't just a tool for beginners. Cyberduck works with a variety of external editors for web jockeys or server admins. It features excellent synchronization features, supports separate editors for different file types, and supports distributed FTP. There is also fine-grained control of file permissions and timestamps, as well as support for custom regexes to skip certain files when doing batch uploads or downloads. Also, files transfers can be throttled by number of concurrent files, and bandwidth limits can be set in both directions.
Version 3.0 adds a very slick integration with Quick Look in addition to a slew of other features.
Rounding out the features in version 3.0 are the addition of an activity window for monitoring all background activity, a very handy bookmarking feature with history, and the addition of Latvian localization to its extensive language support. All told, Cyberduck has localizations in English, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Slovak, Spanish, Chinese (Traditional & Simplified Han), Russian, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Catalan, Welsh, Thai, Turkish, Hebrew, and Latvian.
Again, all these features and power are available for the low, low price of absolutely nothing. Still, if you find it handy, the author accepts donations for his hard work. Though I still prefer Transmit's two-pane interface and general aesthetics, I have no qualms recommending it to anyone needing to do some FTP work.
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