I rarely get excited about software.
Okay, that’s a boldfaced lie. I’m such a bleeding edge geek. At any rate, I spend a lot of time using e-mail and FTP, so I’m always on the lookout for better clients for both.
I do believe that I’ve found possibly the best overall FTP client I’ve ever tried (and I’ve tried all of them). Panic Software’s spanking new Transmit 2 is pleasant on the eyes, feature-complete (without being overkill), speedy, has a built-in text editor, and supports geek stuff like secure connections, batch transfers, and site mirroring.
Being a point-zero release there are a few small quirks, and the fact that Transmit 2 drops the original’s support for editing files in the most commonly used (and best) text editor available (BBEdit) is a bit of an oversight. That said, Panic is working on an update that will address all of these issues. It’s apparently due “any day now”.
I know, it’s hard to get excited about file transfer programs, but it’s damn refreshing to finally discover a program that does everything I’ve wanted a FTP program to do, without feature-itis or poor interface design. Heck, the Panic Web site is damn fine looking too, which doesn’t hurt.
With ‘s not bad iCal now out, and Mac OS 10.2’s built-in Address Book, I’m finding I need the swiss army knife of Mac OS X personal information managers (Microsoft’s Entourage) less and less. Because of that, I’ve been on the hunt for a good e-mail only client.
I’m going to have to keep looking, but one client I tried out which may turn into something worthy is GyazMail, programmed by Japanese coder Goichi Hirakawa.
GyazMail is still in beta (it’s at version 0.93 as I write this), but it’s surprisingly usable and feature-rich even in its unfinished state. The only thing it’s missing right now is support for HTML e-mail, but Hirakawa says this will be available some time after the 1.0 version is released. Personally, I’m hoping he doesn’t support HTML e-mail in the end (it’s all spam, anyway), and does what some clients do and just strip all HTML out. You’re left with just the text, which is all that matters.
Besides that, however, it’s not too shabby, with fairly good mail filtering capability, multiple account support, message threading, and a speedy search function.
Check it out if you’re using ‘s built in Mail client - GyazMail is very fast, not too resource-intensive, and well-designed. I’m still on the hunt, though….
