I’ve used Transmit every day for years. So long, in fact, that I didn’t realize I was still using a pirated copy I’d picked up a long, long time ago. I was almost embarrassed when I went to “upgrade” to Transmit 4 and realized that I’d been unfaithful to Panic, the developers of Transmit. I was profiting (well, not actually profiting, I use Transmit for my personal sites that aren’t monetized) off of their work without offering anything in return. Dick move on my part – and something that was rectified immediately.
I was already at Panic’s site, but I decided to take a quick look over the ad page for Transmit 4. It’s very slick looking, covered in the sheen of pretty that screams “I’m an app for Mac OS X” – I blame Apple, first and foremost, followed by MacHeist for aping the look.
The page declares that Transmit 4 contains 45 new features, that it’s 25x faster, “oh, and one more thing…” – shades of a Jobsian keynote! So the question remains: is it fluff?
Hell no. With Transmit 4 Panic has done what few developers can when they crank the hype to 11 – they’ve actually delivered. Installing Transmit 4 was, naturally, Mac simple. The user interface has been redesigned from the ground up, with slick new features like a smarter path bar they’ve dubbed “Path Bar Pro” and a beautiful new approach to Favourites that demystifies much of input-maze that was found in Transmit 3. Everything feels more Mac-like, making FTP something that’s enjoyable to use, rather than a chore. The new iteration of Sync is positively perfect; it gives you the right amount of information at a glance and lets you deal with other tasks without micromanaging uploads.
You’ll spend a whole lot less time uploading as well. Panic calls the new uploading mechanism the “Transmit Twin-Turbo Engine”. I’m not sure what octane they’re using, but by the lords of Kobol that thing uploads fast. Rolling out a new WordPress site used to take me upwards of an hour due to all of the small file uploads – with Transmit 4 it was done in less than five minutes. I have no idea how long it actually took, as I walked away to make a sandwich (my customary solution to “this is going to take forever” computing tasks).
There are quite a few new features that I’m going to have to spend time exploring – and you probably will as well. There’s integration for Amazon S3 and the new Transmit Disk support wherein you can drag any of your Favourites to the Finder and mount them as disks… even when Transmit isn’t running. Talk about a game changer – if you’re a frequent user of iDisk you may find that Panic has just devalued your MobileMe purchase by a significant degree. Panic has noted that this is the only part of the app that isn’t 64-bit… yet. It will be interested to see the difference in performance when it does go 64-bit.
If you’re not sold on Transmit 4 already, there’s a 7-day demo. The app runs ~$35, and I can say, wholeheartedly, that it’s worth it. I liked Transmit 3. I love Transmit 4. I think you will too.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Graham Williams. Graham Williams said: @Panic Many thanks. Honestly, Transmit 4 is so good I had to write about it – http://twurl.nl/510pw3 Thanks for a solid app! [...]
An hour to roll out wordpress? Transmit is great, but wordpress comes as a .zip or tar.gz for a reason. You upload the archive, then use the server to expand it. Even shared hosting with cpanel has a gui file manager with the ability to expand compressed files. If you’re a dev, you should be able to do it with ssh.
Hi John. Thanks for the comment! It’s very true, in cases where you can expand on the server you can save yourself a lot of time. However, it’s not always available, and in the case I was discussing it wasn’t.
Thanks again!