Dear Users,
This is a great, emotional moment for us (and we believe a major milestone in Mac file management). It feels like ForkLift was preparing for its high-school graduation. For almost two years now, ForkLift has been growing up, learning new stuff, getting better at what it does, and generally maturing into a rather pleasing fellow.
Now, we are getting to the stage where ForkLift will prove its mastering of all essential file management functions, with these two complex new skills: synchronizing and merging folders.
While approaching this release, we’ve also took time look through our incessantly growing todo list, and put in some work for eliminating some items that have been gathering dust for a long time now.
From this point on, our future updates will relate more to the realm of style and elegance, with all basic skills now sharp and ready.
The extra goodies:
- open in terminal
- better than good archives management
- duplicate file
- global preferences for conflict management
- faster FXP copy
- copy URL everywhere
- Go To Folder itemlist
- redesigned info panel
- redesigned activity view
Synching folders
This is the last major file management functionality we had planned for ForkLift since we first tarted working on this project. Also, this is the most frequent feature request we receive.
After careful deliberations we have decided that the one way approach to folder synchronization allows a much faster workflow, as opposed to a bidirectional method that forces the user to make a series of complex choices. With one way synching, you select the source folder which contains files and subfolders you want to copy to the target folder, and let the program sort out what files need to be updated, added, or deleted on the target drive. The one thing you need is to find File > Sync to…
Sync always uses a dual pane view, with the active pane considered as the source folder, and the opposite pane the target.
Once you’ve decided on this, just click Synchronize folders, check the changes in the preview list, and if all’s well, you can lay back and light up while ForkLift does its magic.
Still, if you need them, there are a few handy options to hand-drive the sync process.
Needless to say, synching works in your local folders, on your local network, or any FTP/WebDAV/Amazon S3 connection.
How about synching up your SFTP server folders to your Amazon S3 backup?
And yes, there’s even a bonus: sync will also work in FXP mode 
Merge
As a byproduct of the synchronization feature, we are proud to present, for the first time on the Mac: a proper Merge operation for folders, local and remote. The standard behavior in OS X -i.e. simply overwriting existing folders when the a folder with the same name is copied to its location- has been baffling switchers for a long time.
For the first time on the Mac, proper merging of folders is possible.
Open in Terminal
A surprise goodie we weren’t sure could make the 1.7 release. Open in Terminal is available under the File menu, or in the right-click menu, and causes a terminal window to open with the path of the file or folder selected. Of course, this is only available on local folders.
Better than good archives management
Expanding ForkLift’s archives management features was also one of the things we’ve had on the table since 1.0 beta. ForkLift is now able to create zip, pkzip, tar.gz, tar.bz2 and passworded zip archives.
Duplicate file
Many users will be relieved to learn that cmd-D will now create a duplicate of the selected file or folder in the current location. Works on both local and remote volumes.
Global preferences for conflict management
I don’t think this needs any detailed explanation. If this feature concerns you, I think you must be too happy at this moment to listen to me anyway.
Faster FXP
ForkLift is now able to initiate multi-threaded FXP transfers between FTP servers. Now how about that?
Copy URL everywhere
Copy URL got a warm welcome when we first published the feature. We’ve now improved it a notch to allow copying the path of any file, local or remote, getting a raw file URL even if the remote connection is not set up as meant.
Go To Folder item list
Those who prefer to use the Go To Folder panel to navigate around their systems will be happy to learn that the dialogue will now offer a dropdown item list once you start typing in the desired location’s path.
UI Changes
I really love the new Info Pane – the new typo makes it much more readable and usable. The Activity View also received small enhancements, including more info being displayed on current transfers, and keyboard control is now perfect.
This being a Beta, there is no ready documentation available, but we will be monitoring the ForkLift 1.7 Beta discussion thread and will be there to answer your questions.
Enjoy the new ForkLift 1.7 Beta!
(this version expires on May 1st)
Looking forward to your comments and impressions here and in the forums.
[...] Beta version of the new ForkLift is up, with some spiffy new features, mainly Sync folders and Merge Folders. Nice! Spread the word! [...]
If I bought ForkLift why I can’t use registered beta?
@aa
This is a public beta release for testing and doesn’t require registration.
But I paid for ForkLift so I count that I can use version stable / beta / alpha etc. as a registered.
I love where this is going, but the sync window needs some visual aids.
It is not really clear to me which file remote or local is the one that will be updated.
Does the sync feature work bidrectional ? Ifso, then the layout of this window will only be more confusing.
Also, I would really like a checkbox for each file it finds in the preview window.
Most of the time I have remote files that are different on purpose (i.e. mysql connection scripts)
Yummyftp has a very solid sync feature, you either choose “update mac” or “update server”, which makes it immediately clear what will be updated with what.
Forklift ofcourse goes much further in that it can sync local folders, but still it needs to be clear which file is the one being overwritten with which file.
I’ve seen sync software that use the two panes idea with big arrows going from left to right or from right to left, making it immediately visible which file is overwriting which file.
Love they way forklift has been goin, great work. Any chance we’ll see a file operation queue in the next release?
Is the idea of integrated terminal window still on the mind? I know some people tossed that idea to the side, but I would way rather work in a terminal in ForkLift than in a separate iTerm window for most things that I do. For running scripts, basic file manipulation that I’d rather use in a CLI, and for editing my poetry, I’d really love to have an inbuilt terminal pane. So, I hope you guys are still considering this. Loving the new beta, btw!
Great news and all, but where’s the espresso maker function?
congrats guys!
Ian
pete: as I understand, sync is one way only, active pane is source.
Sorry to double-post, but I forgot one thing above… It would be nice to have the option to use a different terminal app other than Terminal.app as well… As I hinted at in my last post, right now I use iTerm over Terminal, and I know some people opt to use XTerm… So being able to choose might be nice, I’d probably never use the feature if it kept opening up a different application on me…
aah.. thanks Ian,
I was a little to anxious to try the new beta and didn’t read the blog post too well.
Still the issue to deselect certain files remains. I see there is a possibility to create exclude filters, but this is a little too much trouble in many situations.
Forklift is looking mighty nice though.
Try the following,
editing & saving an excel document does not work (FTP), but a .doc is fine!
And I hope you can fix the file-sizes…for Rumpus FTP-Server and ForkLift. Transmit is fine!
> A surprise goodie we weren’t sure could make the 1.7 release. Open in Terminal is available under the File menu, or in the right-click menu, and causes a terminal window to open with the path of the file or folder selected. Of course, this is only available on local folders.
It would be great to see this available also for ssh connections, as ssh implies that you can get shell access to target server
Merging folders on Mac OS X?!?
I love you guys
How strong is the encryption for creating archives? Is it AES 256 for zip and 7z?
Nice.
But please let us edit a folder (again). I use F4 for that to call up TextMate with the selected folder; TextMatex treats the folder as a project.
I use that facility a lot.
Berend
@Tim We are using 7zip and the wiki says: “The 7z format supports encryption with the AES algorithm with a 256-bit key. The key is generated from a user-supplied passphrase using an algorithm based on the SHA-256 hash algorithm. The SHA-256 is executed 218 (256K) times[1] which causes a significant delay on slow PCs before compression or extraction starts. This technique is called key strengthening and is used to make a brute-force search for the passphrase more difficult. The 7z format provides the option to encrypt the filenames of a 7z archive.”
@Berend Will fix that for the next release.
@Mudi Thanks for info. Keep up the great work!
Doubleclick tabbar creates new tab – GREAT ! you heard me.
I’m getting very sluggish (read unusable) behaviour when working on remote drives mounted through a VPN connection.
I do simple things, duplicate the file, rename, and edit.
In Forklift, this is unbearable, in Finder it is ok
just thought I’d mention it
Ideas for 1.7: exchange your proprietary right-click popup menu or find some way to work it into Apple’s right click popup menu. You have Dropbox and other apps that add to Apple’s menu and these are not showing in Forklift + when you look at get info or stuff like that, you don’t get up Apple’s and you have to reveal it in Finder for instance to set file associations. This is very annoying. Also the connect should have SMB, AFP, etc added to it.
May 1st is here, any new beta? I can’t use 1.7b anymore
Beta has expired !
Where is the latest Beta?
To answer my own question, you can dl it at the iusethis Web Site.
Weird…
The latest beta releases are found in versiontracker.com, for some reason they get posted there first.
Sorry guys, we simply forgot to publish the blogpost with the updated beta. It’s there now, so go and grab your new version.
Again, sorry for the mixup