One of the most popular FTP clients for Macs is Cyberduck. I’ve used this programme myself quite a lot and it does have quite a lot of features (it even has a dashboard widget and Growl support) so if you’re looking for a powerful, fully loaded FTP client you can’t go too far wrong. I have experienced one or two little problems with Cyberduck getting to 99% on a file transfer then failing and asking me to start again from scratch instead of just uploading the last percent. This happened a few times and by the time an updated release had come out I’d moved on and found a new favourite FTP client (see below). I should point out that Cyberduck is updated fairly frequently so any little bugs you might find will be ironed out pretty quickly.
My favourite FTP client at the moment is the FireFTP extension for Firefox. As it’s a Firefox extension it can also be used on Windows PCs and has the added advantage of being an extremely small download at only 135KB. FireFTP doesn’t have many bells and whistles but it does the job efficiently and operates seamlessly within a Firefox tab. I’ve been using this extension for the last 6 months or so and I haven’t had any problems.
You’re probably also going to need a text editor if you’re playing around with FTP clients. Well I can also help you there: all you need is Smultron. This little baby has everything you’ll ever need (from an HTML text editor) and also has a pretty fresh looking strawberry design to help brighten up your applications bar!
Don’t forget that you can use FTP clients to backup your data or share large files with friends without risking email bounce backs.
Ben Warner
Mac Editor
Bizhack.net
