ForkLift – the most advanced file manager and FTP & SFTP client for mac

OK, here’s your chance to make an impression on the future of your file manager of choice!

As you probably know, we’re approaching our 1.7 release. But being extremely smart people, we plan ahead. And we are looking before us at a rather long development cycle that will probably take anything from 6-9 months, and at the endpoint of which a shiny new ForkLift 2.0 will emerge.

Now, we have received enough feedback from you guys to know what new features we want to cram into 2.0. The list is pretty well defined.

But we would welcome your help in optimizing and streamlining the workflow processes and operations. What we would like is to see how you are using ForkLift. We’ve had a few detailed and practical descriptions of such issues over in the User Forums, and most of the time some genuinely good ideas and a few easy remedies to annoying glitches were found.

So here we are, calling this great ForkLift Screencast Festival.

There must be plenty of times when FL just blends perfectly into your workflow, and there surely are other times when you hit a rock in your otherwise smooth relationship with ForkLift. Let us take a peek into your everyday life in file management, and take part in creating a better tool.

Even if you don’t want to make a screencast, we would like to ask you to send us a screenshot of your current layout of your ForkLift – we are collecting some statistical data in preparation for some UI changes. You can send these to support at binarynights dot com.

Please use this blog to post links to your screencasts. We will be reviewing and discussing the pieces as they come in.

We’d really like to make this a fun way to contribute significantly to ForkLift. We will close shop and go sulking if we don’t receive some decent nominations.

Fire up your screen capture software aaaannd ACTION!

Dear Users, we have an urgent need for your help. One of the websites we like to visit regularly to bloat our egos with is iusethis - a pretty nice Mac software review/popularity vote site where we can read user comments and see how our band of followers is growing day-to-day.
Well, today we were panicked to see that our iusethis count is at six hundred sixty-six – the number of the Beast, as you know. And while I’m not a superstitious person (because a sorcerer once gave me an amulet carved from the hipbone of a mature alligator bull to protect me from any spiritual harm) I did feel a chill running across my back. 

So please, help us lift this evil omen from ForkLift’s iusethis page by adding your vote and nudging the counter up a notch.
Thanks for giving us a hand with our salvation

Now that the country is slowly disappearing under a cover of surprise snow, the need to watch those huskies is even more pressing. Yet, with the winter raging outside, it gives us that more incentive to stay in late at work, and poke around in Xcode.

Making the best of the extra hours, we’ve finally tackled the Gordian knot of the Activity Viewer – which has received sharp and consistent criticism from our valued users (nice work there Nate), mainly for its lowbrow keyboard responses and nagging confirmation dialogues.

So, I’m happy to report:

- Pressing Enter at this point will Replace the target file.
- Pressing Space first will check in the Apply to All option.
- Tab will cycle through the four controls of the panel, first to Stop, second to Skip.
- Esc will Skip

Once the choice is made, the Activity Viewer will drop to the background, giving back control to ForkLift. When more than one of these confirmation boxes pile up in the Activity Viewer, the cursor will jump smartly to each new box so the keyboard workflow should be smooth (even if boring) even on large operations.

We’ve also introduced an option in Preferences to manage confirmations globally:

This is to say we’re making progress towards our next 1.7 release, even though it is still at some distance in the future.
If you feel impatient, you can hope for more snow to fall on Budapest.

Good nights everyone,

Turns out, there are some people who do pay attention to all the nonsense we post in this our blog. As a consequence, we’re now receiving repeated inquiries from these faithful readers concerning the file synchronization module we showed off with back in November.

Well, I’m happy to report that the module is operational and has passed testing. I’ve used it to update a ~6GB folder structure using FXP between two FTP servers in a few clicks. So, there’s that.
Yet, I must admit we’re still some time away from releasing it (I’m being deliberately vague here). The reason is that while working on file synchronization, we’ve come up with a couple of new methods that we found to be working so well, that we want to implement them in the current copy engine code. And this is some very delicate work believe me, because we feel we’re not only writing code, but writing history.

One extra feature we will get from this is a fully functional Merge operation for folders, á la Windoze. Wow! Did you hear that just now? … as if millions of voices suddenly sighed in relief all at once!

I hope you’ll all agree it’s worth the wait. In the meanwhile, we’ll try not to completely wreck our copy engine

Stay tuned