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Today saw the official release of a new kid on the FTP block: Flow, from Extended Mac Software .
Flow is exciting for a few reasons. First, it’s Leopard only. This means that the interface is super slick (lickable as the developer describes it). Views are animated and everything is simply gorgeous and simple to use. Leopard technologies such as Quicklook are also employed in the app. Quicklook files from your servers!
The first thing you’ll notice when launching Flow, is that it just feels right. It’s super responsive and fits in perfectly with the Leopard UI. Complete with tabs and a simplistic and intuitive interface, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.
Flow provides a built-in editor as well, which is fairly decent. The bottom pane of the window provides you with a live preview of your changes, and the editor actually supports syntax highlighting for HTML, PHP, XML and CSS. However, it seems that Javascript highlighting isn’t available at this time, but hopefully will be in a future release. Note: the image below is while using Quicklook in Flow, not from my Mac.
Bonjour is also available, right in the sidebar. Because I have “Remote Login” (ssh) enabled on my Macbook, my computer showed up under the SFTP folder here. Just double-clicking on my computer and entering my password instantly logged me in and brought up my home folder. If there were more computers on my network, this could be very useful indeed.
Droplets are very useful as well. Simply create a droplet from the “Bookmarks” menu and an icon appears on your Desktop (which you can move then anywhere on your Mac). Then, just drop a file or folder on the droplet, and whether Flow is running or not, the stuff is uploaded to your server.
A few things I’ve noticed. First, If you have a tab open and double-click on a bookmark to log you in, the tab will be used for that bookmark. This is the same behavior that is in Safari. However, I would rather stay logged in to both and have the bookmark be opened in a new tab. If that annoys you, there is an easy set in Preferences to enable. Just a heads up. Second, Bonjour connections seem to be just a bit buggy still. It took me a couple clicks to get the right information to show up in the login pane when clicking on my computer, and once connected, the name of the tab wasn’t updated to the new connection. However, bugs have been filed 
This is definitely an exciting new app and is very refreshing as the previous leader in the FTP space, Transmit, was getting long in the tooth. Congrats to Brian from Extended Mac on his first release!
You can download a free 15 day trial from Extended Mac Software here. Flow is 29 USD for all 1.x upgrades.
July 2nd, 2008 at 3:02 am
August 11th, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Hi… I like this app, but i can’t save the passwords when i bookmark servers… can you help me???