Cyberduck, cyberdoc

Choice of FTP clients has long been a minor religious war among Mac users. I stopped having strong opinions on this a couple years ago when I realized that transparent, read/write FTP/SFTP should really just be built into the OS. Apple’s KEEPING ME DOWN again.

Anyway, somewhere along the line I switched from Interarchy (which I had relied on since “Anarchie” days) to David Kocher’s Cyberduck. There’s no doubt that Interarchy is the more powerful and mature program. But what I need, and what most people need, from this type of program is fairly simple. It’s a graphical client, after all. There are plenty of freely available ways to accomplish more complex file transfer magic tricks – notably rsync and friends. Cyberduck does support the ODBEditor protocol, also known as “Edit With” – this lets you open a file from your FTP client directly in editors like BBEdit, TextWrangler, TextMate, SubEthaEdit, and Smultron that support the protocol. I use this feature pretty heavily.

It’s my opinion that this software category, commercially, is going to more or less disappear. Fewer and fewer people need it, open source flavors like Cyberduck and Fugu serve most of those people fine, and one of these days Apple is going to build it in.

Meanwhile, Kocher is looking for help maintaining and writing the documentation for Cyberduck. If you like the idea of contributing to an open source Mac application but aren’t a programmer, here’s your chance.