a gthing science project

Posted by Sam at January 9th, 2008

If you’re like me an you use FTP servers a lot, you’ve probably noticed a lack of decent FTP clients for Mac OS X.

For the longest time I used Cyberduck, probably the most popular FTP client around (and its free, too!) But as I used FTP more and more, Cyberduck’s annoyances kept getting in my way. For starters, transferring files is slow as all get out. If you are uploading a large group of files - say a Wordpress or Drupal installation, it would fail several times through. Every time it failed, it had to go back through each file to verify its size before it could continue where it left off.

Things got weirder with Leopard. Cyberduck suddenly did things like tell me every single transfer had failed - whether or not it actually had. It would upload all of a 5 megabyte file, keep uploading (???), then finally fail after it had uploaded 6 megabytes. Checking the file on the server would reveal the transfer was a success.

These annoyances (and a few others), lead me to seek out a new FTP client. I first turned Transmit, an FTP client by Panic. I was familiar with some of their other software and always thought they did a great job. However, Transmit left me disappointed. It was still slow like Cyberduck and beyond fixing the bugginess of Cyberduck, it didn’t offer anything new or revolutionary.

I kept search, eventually giving up and resigning to my fate of using Cyberduck - hoping the developers might someday fix it.

Until one day I stumbled upon Yummy FTP.

The name didn’t do much for me, but I decided to give it a try anyway. What did I have to lose? What I found was a breath of fresh air. A fast, stable FTP client with auto error-correction, multi-threading, and a simple interface. Everything I need!

I started using Yummy a month or two ago and haven’t looked back since.

The first thing I noticed was how fast it was. Cyberduck and Transmit would take forever to upload a Drupal installation to a server, but Yummy did it in record time. I noticed in the transfer window it was actually opening multiple connections to the server.

Awesome!

But how does it do with error handling? One of the best FTP clients for Windows is called “Bullet Proof FTP.” It’s called that because it is bullet proof - any transfer error that comes up it will ignore. It will just keep trying until the file is transfered. This makes sense - because if you’re trying to transfer a file you don’t want a bunch of error windows, you just want it to get transfered.

Yummy FTP features similar error recovery. It just works. The prefs window even lets you fine tune the error handling, but the defaults were fine for me.

It’ll try enough times to get around common transfer hiccups, but not too much in case there is actually a problem.

Another cool thing is the dock menu, which allows you to quickly connect to any of your bookmarked servers.

Yummy allows you to also create FTP droplets. These are icons that you can drop files onto and all your transfers will take place automatically, without any further intervention.

One thing that annoyed me (the only thing, really) about Yummy was that it automatically opened up to a “new connection” window where you could type in FTP details rather than the bookmarks window, which seems like the logical place you would want to be.

This was easily fixed in the preferences. You can toggle the behavior of both windows upon startup. I simply disabled the new connection window and enabled the bookmarks window.

The wording is a bit strange. They should probably both just say “Show xxx window at launch.” I don’t know why they worded the new connection one differently. It just made it a bit confusing at first.

Yummy is packed full of a bunch of other features I am discovering all the time. Batch and scheduled transfers, advanced syncing, color labels and organization options, and more. I was even able to hook it up to my favorite text editor Smultron for quick and easy editing of on-server files.

Yummy FTP costs $25, but for me the price is worth what you get. If you have several servers you connect to, run a few websites, or otherwise use FTP a lot then Yummy is a must. I highly recommend it.

If you use FTP servers once every six months, you could probably stand to use Cyberduck.

There is a full-featured 30 day trial available if you’d like to try it out.