Cyberduck 2.4.5 review

It might lack the cachet of Fetch or Transmit, but when it comes to FTP, David Kocher's open-source Cyberduck should be taken seriously.

Freshly updated for Mac OS X Tiger, Cyberduck is a robust FTP and SFTP application whose lack of visual clutter and cleverly intuitive features make it easy to use.

Nowhere is the emphasis on usability more clearly illustrated than when using Cyberduck to connect to FTP servers. Alongside the standard kind of connection methods - clicking a chunky toolbar button or entering login details straight into Cyberduck's Quick Connect field, you can also store frequently visited FTP sites as bookmarks. The concept of bookmarks is not unique, but Cyberduck's are easily editable and, as they are stored in a pull-out drawer, it is easy to move between sites with a single click.

As you would expect from a modern FTP application, files and folders can be transferred by dragging them between Cyberduck's directory window and the Mac's Finder. However, two usability touches stand out here, too. The first is the way you can upload without first having to manually invoke a connection to the server by dragging a file or folder onto a bookmark, which automatically uploads it to the bookmarked directory in the background.

Even neater is the Transfer Queue, a floating window onto which you can drag files and folders from different sites. Thanks to Cyberduck's support for multiple connections, it is possible to batch-download these in one go later.

Other features are just as clever, if scantily documented. An iTunes-style search field in the toolbar makes it easy to isolate files in a directory, while file and folder permissions can be intuitively adjusted. There is even a rudimentary Synchronise option to keep local and remote files in harmony. Like other FTP programs, Cyberduck also supports direct text editing through popular HTML editors, including SubEthaEdit, BBEdit, CSSEdit and TextWrangler.

AppleScript support is a bonus. The script dictionary is comprehensive and the bundled real-world scripts - thankfully relating to real-world use - are genuinely useful.

Even if Cyberduck lacks some of the higher-end features of Panic Software's Transmit, unless your file-transfer needs are complex, Cyberduck is an excellent choice.