I had never heard of this program until I checked the TextMate documentation and saw it listed as one of the programs that supports TextMate as an external editor. Okay, I thought. They are current with the latest Macintosh Web buzz. I’ll try it out.

I liked what I saw. It was time to update and clean up one of my sites. Might as well try out the demo.

It looks like an FTP program. No surprise here. We see the modern two pane view with local directories on the left and the server on the right. There is no obvious way to reverse this, which doesn’t bother me. That’s how I’m used to working. Feature buttons have obvious icons and one touch I like is that the icons default to “Use Small Size” by default. It is easy to close the local view and use the program as another finder window, if you prefer.

This as a professional level webmaster’s tool. All of the expected power features are present, such as Mirroring, Remote Editing, Filtering, AppleScriptability, etc.. It also has a keyboard commands for almost every function, a nice touch.

Yummy supports both column and list views making it very easy to navigate through a site quickly. Since I first saw this feature I have considered it mandatory for my FTP program. It’s well implemented here and fast. Yummy supports several navigation options. Besides the column view there are the traditional forward and back buttons as well as a pull down menu that shows the entire path to the current window. The list view allows sorting by name, date modified, size and kind. The latter is nice because it sorts directories by folder first then alphabetically. Windows FTP clients sort that way and that was one of the few benefits of having to work on Windows for a while.

Yummy offers some other excellent features. A File menu command makes it easy to set a desktop alias to a remote folder. Then adding files to your server is a simple drag and drop. Yummy FTP starts up and does its thing then auto quits. Simple and elegant. Desktop Watcher attaches a folder action to any folder and auto uploads and datestamps files. It has folder synchronization and scheduling.

Yummy FTP works well with Rendezvous, making connections with local network servers automatic. Like a good Cocoa app it stores bookmarks and passwords in Keychain. It is possible to select the default local folder for a connection, though that is not immediately obvious. I had to first create a connection, then select it in the bookmarks window, then click the Advanced icon. It works. However, since I always keep mirrors of websites in my Home folder I would like to see the option in the default Bookmarks Edit pane. That’s just a quibble though. I don’t move my sites around on my hard drive so the extra step doesn’t come up more than once a site.

Yummy also has a file preview button. Previewing is so fast that I’d never know I was viewing a remote file. It’s a really nice to be able to see that remote image, that I can’t quite remember or to view the code of any text based file. In column view, the right most column works just like the finder giving file size and type.

Right clicking (That’s right - right not Control click. Come on Apple. Make a two button trackpad) on a file gives an excellent selection of options, like Add Favorite, Create Alias, New Folder, Get Info and more. It’s as complete a listing as any I’ve seen. I’m a big fan of contextual menus and like this one.

I do have a couple of small quibbles with Yummy FTP. Yummy has made the application opening display a bit too cute with it sort of unfolding as panes and drawers activate. It’s fun the first time. It’s annoying after that. I’d like to be able to turn that, ah, feature? off in preferences. I would also like to be able to set my double click option to edit files. Transmit has recently added remote image editing and I’d like that in Yummy FTP too.

Yummy FTP is fast. I gave up on Transmit a year ago because it would slow way down while uploading any file larger than 45-60 KB. It seems that Macintosh OS X (System 9 is fine) does not handle FTP as quickly as possible. Yummy FTP must use a different transfer engine. It also runs uploads on more than one file at a time, which noticeably speeds up multi-file transfers. FTP programs spend a significant amount of their time shaking hands with the web server and it’s nice to have several files moving at once so the pipe is always used. Also, I get a bit more bandwidth from my ISP while running multiple uploads or downloads than with a single file. I don’t know if this is particular to this situation or the way all cable systems work.

The user manual is a Wiki on the Yummy website. That makes sense but I’d like to have a local copy. The quick start guide is adequate for experienced FTP users.

Conclusion:
This is a solid program, well thought out. It has a solid feature set. Best on Mac speed and ease of use make it a good choice.

Yummy FTP
Publisher Yummy Software
$25 shareware - 15 day full demo
Yummy FTP requires Mac OS X 10.3 or higher

Value: 5
Features: 4
Documentation: 3
Ease of Use: 4
Stability: 5
Macness: 4

Highly Recommended

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 12:13 am and is filed under FTP, Pro User, Software Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.