Inspired by Dave Caolo’s “Three reasons” series on his blog 52Tiger, this isn’t a full review of Panic’s Transmit 4, but just a quick, personal summary of why you should get Transmit 4 (or upgrade, if you’re an already happy user of Transmit 3).
1. Speed. Yes, when I read Panic’s page for Transmit, I admit I raised an eyebrow: “Speed?” — I thought — “It’s an FTP application, and connection speed is what it is. How can I perceive any improvement?”. I was so wrong in doubting Panic’s fine developers. If you’re skeptical, I suggest a little yet emblematic experiment: use Transmit to navigate and interact with your iDisk (if you have a MobileMe account). Another planet, believe me.I’ve never used the Finder to access my iDisk. Too slow, not only with file transfers, but simply navigating the folders’ hierarchy was a pain. Up to now, I’ve always resorted to the good old Goliath which, despite not being updated since 2004, was surprisingly good for iDisk use. Now I’ve definitely, happily switched to Transmit 4.
2. Quick Look. Again, it sounds like a minor feature, but it’s so unbelievably handy. For work, I often have to download a lot of documents from remote servers. Sometimes the lists of files I’m given aren’t 100% accurate, and it’s quite annoying having to download a hundred files blindly, check them in the Finder, and open a new FTP session to download more files blindly and check later if they’re the good ones, etc. With Quick Look, I can preview them all before downloading and make sure they’re really the documents I have to work on.
3. But my absolute favourite feature is Disks. Quoting from Panic’s Transmit page:
With the new Transmit Disk feature, you can now mount any of your favorites in the Finder itself, even if Transmit’s not running. These volumes are real: drag files to your SFTP server, save a small graphic to your Amazon S3 bucket directly from Photoshop, or roll your own iDisk-like backup volume. It’s all possible in Transmit 4.
This feature has positively removed one step in my workflow, making it faster. Before, I used to create an “In/Out” folder inside my Home folder as a temporary parking lot for files to be uploaded to the client’s server. When a document was ready for upload, I would make a copy of it inside the In/Out folder, open Transmit 3, upload it to the remote server, close Transmit, go back to work, repeat the process. Now I just keep the client’s remote volume mounted on my desktop, with a Finder window of the destination folder always open, and when I finish a translation, I just drag and drop the document on that folder and voilà. Quick and easy, and I don’t have to bother with making duplicate copies of the files, etc.
As the fine folks at Panic say, I really think you will like this app. It’s really worth what little it costs. If these reasons aren’t enough, please go to Panic’s website, and check all the new features of Transmit 4. Then buy it!