ForkLift Review
ForkLift position itself as the "The most advanced file manager and FTP/SFTP/Amazon S3/WEBDav client for Mac OS X (10.7)." They just might be right about that! Binary Nights certainly packs a lot of features into their FTP application.
My first reaction is that they didn't support remote editing files since when I did the Apple-J to edit a file, the view options menu appear. After some looking around, I discovered that the shortcut to remote editing files in ForkLift is 'Command-Down Arrow'.
ForkLift has some pretty cool features: Compair allows you to see the difference between any two remote files. This is cool if you have a backup of a file and need to know what changed. The 'Quick Look' feature works just like Mac OS X and allows you a preview of the file content without having to download the file. The ability to browse Archive makes it easy to identify what's in that old archive.bak.tar file.
I really like the 'Calculate All Sizes' view option. I was able to view the file content sizes on my sftp server. This isn't something that I was able to do with other FTP clients. Really cool to know what folders are taking up the most disk space on my server.
It was really easy to setup Droplets, I was able to put my Image folder on the Desktop and easily drag images to the icon and upload them to the server. This even worked when I had ForkLift application closed, making this an easy way to upload files to the server.
The 'Terminal' functionality seems pretty cool, the ability to open a Terminal window at the current path. I wasn't able to get this working on my directory. The menu item wasn't available.
Overall I am impress with the core functionality of ForkLift. It seems to offer a lot of practical tools that regular users will like and additional functionality that power users will flock to. I would recommend OS 10.7 users to check out Forklift and see how it can help you.
My only complaint is the default keyboard shortcut to remote edit files, I have been so use to doing the Command-J for a long time. It would be tough to get use to ForkLift keyboard shortcut.
Single-user License for ForkLift is $29.95, and the upgrade from previous version is only $19.95. There is a family licence which is $49.95 (Fun for the whole family?) You can get the Application via the Apple Store or through their website. I would recommend getting through website since you get the Disklets feature which allows you to mount remote volumes making them appear to your Mac as simple local drives.