Filed under: Software
Forklift 1.5: fast, pretty and stable.
Forklift, the split-pane file manager with support for multiple network protocols, is officially at version 1.5 now. We covered the initial release a while back, and we're excited about the progress it's made. With an interface update (Leopard goodness) and some behind-the-scenes tweaks, it's turning into a sweet piece of work.
Forklift has always been of interest to me, with its support for SFTP and Amazon S3, but my previous experiences with Forklift had shown it to display a tendency toward a little sluggishness and the occasional poorly-timed crash. This latest version has not only been stable for me, but has been snappy. And by that I mean speedy to the extreme, especially when dealing with (S)FTP servers and S3. Ten times faster on remote transfers, actually, according to their own benchmarks.
Quick Look and FXP Copy (server-to-server file transfer) round out a great feature set. If you're looking for a Finder add-on/replacement (or a great FTP client), definitely download the trial. At $29.95, it's quite reasonably priced for what it can do. And for current users the upgrade is free and will fix quite a few shortcomings you may have noticed thus far. Version 1.5 is Leopard-only, but 1.2 is still available for our striped friends.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
geoscopic said 3:32PM on 3-17-2008
Why would I want this?
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Quine said 3:22PM on 3-17-2008
you would want this if you used ftp to access remote servers a lot and/or thought the finder's functionality was too limited and wanted more features.
hohum said 4:03PM on 3-17-2008
You might want this because it's an extremely stable, capable dual-pane file manager. Your other comment (that you're good with Transmit) seems to imply that you're only thinking of it as an FTP client. It does work very well as an FTP client (w/ FXP support), but that's not what it -is-... It's a file manager that also supports various network protocols. It picks up on a lot of the Finder's shortcomings. If you have a lot of data to be moving around, it really comes in handy. I bought it just to organize a giant folder full of stuff into a set of hierarchical folders, which would have been a tedious task using finder alone. I suppose it is a bit of a niche product, but IMO, it has its moments where it's extremely useful because of conveniences that the Finder lacks. I don't work for BinaryNights or anything, I just sing the praises of ForkLift because I think it's a great tool.
Peter Zich said 3:23PM on 3-17-2008
Snazzy graphics.
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geoscopic said 3:32PM on 3-17-2008
aside from the snazzy graphics I'm good with Transmit...
Jacques Lema said 4:15PM on 3-17-2008
I still use Transmit regularly for FTP but I absolutely love Forklift to work on my local files and now that the 1.5 release is final I may finally switch completely. It has dual panes and tabs. Plus it's small and fast. It's the closest thing to TotalCommander if you still miss it from Windows (trust me I tried them all). You can just enter in a zip archive by pressing enter and extracting select files and most of the goodie TTCommander did, except it doesn't look like an ugly Win31 app. Right now you can't edit files and put them back right in the archive as TotalCommander did but I hope this is coming.
Also the developers have been very reactive to user's comments. They really deserve that we get a license for this.
The killer feature for me: sync'ed browsing. You can browse a local folder with a copy of your files and and your SFTP server while keeping in sync. This means you enter the 'images' folder on the left, it does the same on the right.
I just can't understand why nobody did this before.
Jorge said 4:41PM on 3-17-2008
Transmit has linked folder navigation too. Go to the Go menu and choose Link Folder Navigation. Then you can browse local and remote in sync.
Jon said 4:03PM on 3-17-2008
Quote: "Ten times faster on remote transfers, actually, according to their own benchmarks."
If you look on their site, they say that the "10+ times increase in transfer rates" is a "totally unverified claim," and they would "be happy to see someone do a real benchmark test".
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Chris Newton said 5:58PM on 3-17-2008
You might also want to use this for connecting to the Amazon shares... the Amazon S3 accounts.
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Emersum Biggens said 7:12PM on 3-17-2008
I can't verify 10x faster exactly but it is much faster than the previous version and the interface is easily 7x better.
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Ruud Welten said 7:44PM on 3-19-2008
Well, I'd love to use the new version of Forklift. It looks pretty cool, however I'm still running Tiger and for now won't be upgrading to Leopard. So naturally I clicked the 'Skip this version' button ... but now EVERY time I launch Forklift it asks me to update.
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Jan Michael said 11:54AM on 3-21-2008
Tried Forklift and found out after 10 minutes or so that the app is crashing if you drag an *.app to the application folder in the favourites pane on the left.
Another thing that is annoying is that there are no predefined keyboard shortcuts for copying or moving files between the split windows.
Just my 2¢.
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