Surprise ! We actually reached the next step in the development of ForkLift2 earlier than expected. This time we mostly looked under the hood and fixed the damages caused by the recent cosmetic surgery as well as numerous other annoying insects. We also brought the possibility back to add groups of favorites to the sidebar as you all requested and added some more little enhancements for your convenience.

Put your hands on it straight away and have your say as always.

ForkLift 2 (Beta 4)

Screencast: ForkLift 2 (Beta 4) favorites management

As we unleashed this monster on our users we are taking responsibility for the aftermath too…

We got a lot of feedback from y’all, thank you again, we knew we can count on you!

It was impossible not to notice the grumbling about the removal of the favorites from the sidebar. Therefore let me just shortly explain the reason for this decision and also react on your shouts for getting them back. We intended to alleviate the sidebar by removing those loads of favorites and only leave Places there to give you the possibility to access your most used favorites with a click. After you made us clear how upset you are about this decision we reconsidered it now and decided to remove Places from the sidebar too…

…just kidding…

In reality we came to the decision, that instead of Places you will be able to add any favorite group to the sidebar from the Favorites Panel, but only complete groups. Isn’t this a great compromise?

The possibility to add favorites to the sidebar remains, while it still get’s tidier.

Hope you all like the decision.

Shout out loud while you can!

As you could probably already sense from one of our previous posts this release is a lot about streamlining and re-designing various elements of the User Interface. We integrated a lot of panels into the main window and re-evaluated many workflow processes to enable you working even faster and more efficiently with files. New favorites management, a new Connect interface and a completely new progress bar with transfer queue are only some to mention.

Of course we also fixed a wast amount of bugs and updated many functionalities, to deliver what is expected from the most advanced file manager for Mac.

This version pretty much reflects the final shape we have in mind for ForkLift2. Little things might still change while getting to the final release but we think the main elements of the GUI and most functionalities are close to their final state by now. We hope you will love it all and please let us hear your opinions as always.

But hey, why just reading about it? Why not trying it straight away?

ForkLift 2.0 Public Beta build (3)

Finally I would like to send out a BIG THANK YOU to everyone out there in the ether who is helping us with all the reports and suggestions! You guys rock!

I think there’s nothing left to say but ENJOY. Keep on reporting and suggesting

… and don’t play too long with your shiny new ForkLift, there’s a day tomorrow, too

Work easier, work faster…

this is the motto of Mercurial SCM, a free, distributed source control management tool (http://mercurial.selenic.com/), and this is exactly why Mudi decided to give it a shot and switch from good old Subversion (SVN) to this promising alternative. And guess what? It just kicks ass!

Since quite a while Mudi was looking for a faster, more convenient, decentralized solution instead of SVN so he started a journey around the world wide web to discover new ways to manage the source of ForkLift. At first look he was attracted very much by GIT (http://git-scm.com/) but luckily Maciek, one of our loyal Beta Testers sent him the links to the better track: hg

Mercurial really keeps what it promises. Opposed to Subversion, which is a typical client-server architecture with a central server to store the revisions of a project (this fact Mudi found mostly unfortunate), Mercurial is truly distributed, meaning that each developer stores a copy of the complete development history locally. With this smashing tool we can work independently of network access or a central server.

Committing, branching and merging are mind-blowingly fast and as our deadline for the final release of ForkLift2 is nearing we really needed this extra speed to be able to deliver a truly state of the art file manager for your Mac on time.

We recommend everyone who is into software development to have a close look at Mercurial and dare to take the step to switch from conservative source management tools like SVN or CVS.

So now we all just need to keep fingers crossed and hope we don’t run into too many strange creatures in the night…

Long time no hear, eh? Yes, yes we were silent for quite a long time, but I think when you see a glimpse of how we are reshaping your favorite Mac vehicle you will forgive us for neglecting our Blog in the last months. We were re-thinking many elements of ForkLift to optimize the workflow and improve the visual appearance even more with the upcoming Public Beta 3 release at the end of the month.

So here we go and don’t slobber your screen

First of all let me introduce our new, slick, integrated connect panel. No more unnerving extra window popping up from now on and what a pleasure for the eye!

We  also designed a brand new integrated panel to manage and display your favorites in a much more sophisticated way. In the future you won’t have a huge sidebar with hundreds of favorites listed there, though the possibility to drag the most important ones there still remains.

In the previous Beta releases the progress bar was integrated into the sidebar and many of you guys complained about how inconvenient it can be in many cases. “Free the progress bar!” you screamed, and we heard it.

Here you go guys, you set it free: a neatly integrated progress bar at the bottom of the main window with a lot of new space to display relevant infos about the progress.

And last but not least… voilá Le Transfer Queue! Completely re-designed and integrated in the main window. To display it you will just have to click on the button at the left corner of the progress bar and it slides up right away. All items that where added to the transfer queue itself, as well as all other initiated actions are clearly displayed here and it is so good to look at it.

So much for today folks, I hope it was refreshing. Let us hear your voices as usual and stay tuned as more sweets are to be uncovered soon…

This new beta build brings some major fixes, plus the addition of a great new feature to ForkLift 2’s toolbox.

Disklets

Disklets let other OSX applications access the servers connected via ForkLift, as if they were local disks.
You can mount existing favorites as Disklets, or create a new Disklet directly from the Connect… panel. The feature works with all our supported protocols. The mounted server appears as a local disk in the Devices section of Finder and other apps’ file dialogues.
The Disklet feature requires the third-party extension MacFUSE to work and ForkLift will prompt for your confirmation to install the component.

I guess you get the idea.

Don’t think this is the only surprise we have for you – there are some pretty radical updates yet to come in future beta builds.
For a complete list of the new features in ForkLift 2.0, please check our previous post.

If you haven’t done so yet, you can download the beta here:
ForkLift 2.0 Public Beta build (2)

FIXES

This is also the first bugfix release of ForkLift 2’s public beta, published almost a month ago. Even though there was little advertising for the beta, we were surprised at the download traffic stats. Great to see there’s interest
But even more surprising was that the picture that came to appear from your bugreports wasn’t that bad at all. That’s of course relative to a first beta

So, here we are now with some vastly improved functionality, such as:
- iDisk crash fixed. As I said before, this was just a stupid mistake in the build.
- Mouse multiselect and drag-and-drop now works along fine with Keyboard selection.
- Putting a label on an item in a Stack is now reflected on the original item, in the normal file list.
- Tabs are now remembered after relaunching the app.
- Total size of selected items now shown in status bar.
- Amazon S3 buckets with a ‘.’ period in their names now work fine.
- Modification dates on Amazon S3 accounts now show correctly.
- Faulty values in Amazon S3 ACL settings now fixed.
- SFTP connection failed to prompt for password under certain conditions. This is now fixed.
- SFTP now pops up alert if remote path is not recognized.
- Folder synchronization filters now retain settings for ‘folders’.
- Fixed crash on accessing passworded archives.
- Some sidebar favorite fixes, including multiple item drag-and-drop and New Group creation.
- Get Info dialogue sourced info mixup fixed.
- Select view – cmd-enter now does select command, as an alternative to enter ‘add to selection’.
- a last, minor addition is the ability to remove items from the sidebar by simply dragging them out of the sidebar area.

That’s all for now.
Sweet Dreams Everyone

The Second Coming of File Management is NOW!

Take a test drive of the fastest FTP engine ever made and read more about the awesome new features in our blog post.

Well the big day has come. What you’re about to see is still a work in progress (I guess that’s the meaning of a beta ) but we’ve waited so long that we couldn’t hold it in anymore:

The Fastest and Most Competent File Management Tool in Existence

ForkLift 2.0 (beta1) – for Snow Leopard only

And while those bytes download, I hope you won’t mind if we entertained you with a few short paragraphs about what ForkLift 2.0 is bringing to this World today.

A Shiny New App

The most important thing about ForkLift 2 is that it is an entirely new application. And I feel I should give you our a little explanation about why we decided to write everything up from scratch. The main reason was that the FL1 engine dates back to Tiger times. And although it is still good enough (some would say the best ) we got an increasing feeling that we could do at least twice as good, if we started all over again. Being very simple folks at heart, this is exactly what we did.

So we created a new project in Xcode and started typing. This was about a year ago, and today you are downloading a brand new, fully 64-bit application that does everything that ForkLift did, just faster, better, and with some great extras.

In January, we’ve started a closed beta program, and since then we had a crew of merry testers to help find the first 362 bugs. And we’d like to take this opportunity to thank all these guys for the time, support and hard work that they volunteered for the benefit of us all. Thank you!

If you’re download has already completed, you can just scan through the following paragraphs – I’ve boldified the references to

THE NEW FEATURES IN FORKLIFT 2

Fast, Faster, ForkLift 2

I wish there was a part of the new engine I could show you, that’s how beautiful the code is. And it’s also seriously fast. In our performance-heavy tests is performed 3x-33x faster than any other file transfer app in existence.

Yep, that’s ANY other app.

Crisp, Distractionless UI

Our chief concern here was to bring the UI even closer to native apps, and to keep it as simple and as little distracting as possible. The most visible changes in the interface are of course the new view options (Column, Icon and Cover Flow). There are however several less visual, but incredibly useful changes in workflow, such as:

- the new Sidebar sections that provide fast access to special items, including Recent Folders, Remote Editing, and Bonjour network;

- Stacks, which are virtual folders, temporary holdalls that you can use to organize items from various locations;

- Workspaces, which lets quickly switch between complete tab arrangements;

- and a new Docked Activity View that lets you keep track on the progress of current jobs right in the main application window.

More Control over Connections

All new engines for FTP, SFTP, S3, AFP and SMB protocols - they are all beautifully fast and capable. Another frequent request was the ability to Authenticate for files owned under another user, which is now possible, just like in Finder. Many have also put in requests for better permissions management – you can now set permissions on groups of files and on entire folder structures recursively, and you can now do this also in octal format.

There is a new remote edit engine, and it brings some great features, like the dedicated Remote Editing Sidebar section.

Saving the sweet stuff for the last here, you now have Undo for all local network operations.

A Warm Welcome to the Unarchiver framework

To satisfy all archiving needs for once and for all, we decided to get outside help and sought out Dag Ågren, the person behind the excellent and omnivorous Unarchiver for Mac. And Dag was very cool about it and simply offered us the use of his all-in-one framework in ForkLift. So a great thanks to Dag for his generosity!

This enables ForkLift to open the more obscure compression formats, while also taking good care of all the major formats, including Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt, etc. A list of all supported filetypes and features can be found at the official Unarchiver website.

With the powerful framework covering our back, we could focus more on the controls, so FL2 has an Extract command, that will extract the archive right in the current folder.

Folder Synchronizing Robots

There are two major additions to the Sync To command, and it’s not the nice new interface. That’s just the bonus. A feature we’ve planned for some time was adding the possibility to filter for folders in sync jobs, which is now available in the Filter setup panel.

But the best are the new Synclets. These are little satellite apps, much like Droplets, with which you can save a particular sync configuration. You can place the Synclet anywhere, your Dock, a folder, or a Toolbar – just click it and the Synclet runs the preconfigured operation. Using the Synclet in combination with Automator can do magic. Setting scheduled backups is one thing, but with folder actions, you can use the Synclet to just sync up a folder to the server anytime a file is changed or a new file appears. I mean right away.

More Control over Files

We made serious changes in the workflow of locating and selecting files. There is still a Spotlight search in the upper right corner. You can toggle the search box to our own recursive search tool, which you can use to even on remote connections. Filters and the Select… tool have moved to the top of each pane, making a more logical connection with the file lists.

And yes, you can use RegExp in all these tools

More Information

The Get Info panel got some loving with a much nicer display for metadata, but also some serious upgrades, with better permissions management, the ability to set default Open applications, change file type icons, and call up the Inspector just like in Finder. The Info Pane at the bottom of the page will now also display pixel size for image files.

For more control over your FTP transfers, ForkLift 2 now has a Transcript log you can review later.

Multi Rename

So many people complained of FL1’s batch rename UI that we couldn’t leave it unchanged. While at the job, we’ve also decided to simplify access to the tool – if you try to rename a selection of multiple files, well, this is what you get. Hence, we also changed the name to Multi Rename.

Introducing RegExp support in ForkLift would have been of no use if you couldn’t use it for renaming. I believe with good RegExp skills in your hand, you can do pretty much anything with multi rename.

Transfer Queue

The transfer queue is a last minute inclusion in the 2.0 release, but this was also a frequent request and we couldn’t resist the opportunity to spoil you. You can now add copy jobs to a queue, pause and restart jobs as convenient, use concurrent transfer setting to control bandwidth use, and set conflict and error management rules so you can leave large transfers for the night.

Empty Trash

Not a big advance in itself, but if we printed out the emails requesting a toolbar icon for emptying the trash we’d have a trashcan to the brim.

I’m sure the download completed by now, but there are still a million small things, so I’ll just throw in a list of a few more important ones that come to mind:

- new Quick List with network Shares and Places added

- improved Go To Folder dialogue with new autocomplete

- ability to create Symlinks

- revised Copy URL and a new Open URL command to match

- file list sorting through keyboard shortcuts

I guess now you’d rather go and take a ride, but I still have some official announcements to make:

1. Pricing. With the coming of version 2.0 we are changing our pricing for ForkLift, upping the price to $29.95, because we believe it’s worth it. The new price becomes effective today, as licenses bought on or after today include the upgrade to 2.0.

2. Upgrading. The price of the upgrade for license holders will be half of this, $14.95. The upgrade will become available with the official, final release of 2.0.

Exempt from the paid upgrade will be all those who have purchased ForkLift at the 2008 price $44.95.

3. There is no documentation as yet of ForkLift 2, but I’m sure everyone will find their way around easily.

4. Please send bugreports through the form on our Support page. Everyone is welcome to join in the discussions at the User Forums.

Have a great night everyone

BinaryNights

We’ve been keeping the secrecy up for almost a year, but we’re just about to burst now. So, here’s the great news:

ForkLift 2.0 is coming to a PUBLIC BETA on May 1st!

We very much expect this date will go down in history books (or maybe wikipedia) as the day when salvation came to all those, who have to work with files from time to time.

There will be no more doubts and dilemmas between which clients to choose – ForkLift 2.0 is ushering in a new era of absolutes:

- absolute speed
if you show us anything faster, we’ll go and shoot it
- absolute reach
no other app can give you access to so many places
- absolute fluidity
the smoothest workflow you’ve ever experienced in a system utility
- absolute power
now with even more power-features added

As you can see from the hint in the top banner, ForkLift is getting a serious visual overhaul that resulted in a much cleaner, lighter interface and a set of beautiful new icons, crafted to perfection by the truly awesome guys at guifx.com

But that’s just the looks. Underneath the shiny new skin lies a brand new, supercharged V2.0 engine that we’ve spent the better part of the past 12 months designing and building from scratch.

This is the best we are able to do with over 10 years programming experience, 4 years of file management on Mac, and over 10000 emails and comments from you, our honored Users.

I will not give you any details on the new features to come, but those who have followed ForkLift’s progress will have a good idea. But, in case you are wondering whether we really meant it when we said in our reply that your feature request or fix will make it to 2.0, then yes it did

And only 17 days to go until you can get your hands on it.

Good Nights Everyone

Regular readers of our blog will have noticed the unusual envelop of silence that has descended upon the comings and goings of our little workshop lately.
Indeed, we are rather absorbed in work on FL 2.0 and our social life is mostly limited to our bugtracking system.

Still, it’s now the beginning of March and we had to realize we owe some updates.

As you might know, we’ve started a closed beta testing a while back. There are now over 40 people playing around with ForkLift2 and it is starting to behave more and more like a file manager should.

We’ve recently released the 12th test build, and there 167 tickets have been submitted to our bugtracker so far. And it feels like we’re going to climb into the third and fourth digits before this is over.

What we have so far is a pretty sound pretty new FTP/SFTP engine that works great, is superfast, and is free from problems even when connecting to non-standard servers. Users who have been troubled by timeout errors on some servers will also find their lives easier. The new code also fixes earlier problems with managing network shares. FL2 will now let you connect manually to local samba and other shares when they are not detected automatically. FL 1.x’s recurring problems with windows shares (especially the slow browsing of these volumes since the Sno Leo update) seem to have been cured.

The new engine will also authenticate you to handle files and folders to which the user with which you are logged in has no access privileges to (an issue we had hanging there for some time now). Also, FL2 will have a transfer queue, another feature that has been requested many times. FL2 will also include a transcript log for FTP transfers, again a piece of candy for powerusers.

The two panels have been retooled from the ground. Attentive readers probably know it already, but FL2 will have Column, Icon and Coverflow views.

In the panels too, we’ve fixed a couple of things that have been nagging us for a while. For instance, retaining panel positions and sort orders inside the panels between quitting and restarting ForkLift has been a problem issue in 1.x which we’ve now thoroughly fixed, and even introduced some new workplace management feature that we think massive FL users will find to be very gratifying.

About current status: there are still some actual functional bugs in the code, but recently, we have been able to grant a bit more attention to workflow and process tuning, so I see definite progress.

It is clear though that our initial ETA for a public beta was way too optimistic with a March release. The way it feels at the moment is that there’s still got a good 2 months to go, so I am now updating the ETA of the public beta to around May.

Place Your Bets

To keep us entertained until May, I though we could make a little game out of our bughunting quest. Whoever comes closest in guessing the final number of bugreports that will be recorded into our bugtracking system until the end of the closed beta will get a FREE UPGRADE TO FORKLIFT 2.0
*(participants of the closed beta are of course barred)

On that bombshell I am now ending this update.

Good Nights Everyone