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Looking For The Next Best Thing

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If you were at last Sunday's MacGroup meeting, you got to see Terry White demonstrating some of his favorite utilities.  And if you weren't at the meeting it will eventually show up on MacGroup TV. A couple of the utilities Terry showed, WhatSize (for finding out what's using up all your disk space) and Transmit (and FTP program) are excellent programs, but they aren't free ($12.99 and $34.00 respectively).

Now, they aren't outrageously priced, but sometimes you just don't have the scratch available. So I thought you might be interested in a couple of free alternatives.

Back on March 24,2010, I wrote about OmniDiskSweeper, which has pretty much the same functionality as WhatSize, but it's free, It used to be a paid app, but for whatever reason the Omni Group decided to make it available as freeware.

For an FTP client, you can try out Filezilla. There are versions for OS X, Unix, Linux, and Windows, so if you have to work with different operating systems, you can use a program on each with the same look, feel and commands. You can queue up multiple transfers and right-click files to open them in their default programs. You can also drag and drop files around. 

It doesn't have all the features of Transmit, but again, for free, the price is right. It does let you see the actual commands passed back and forth, which can be very helpful when trying to figure out why you can't  connect to a server.

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  • Bruce M

    Another alternative to Transmit is Cyberduck. I do prefer Transmit and have used it forever.

  • Stéphane

    I use Grand perspective to see file size in a graphical way… it’s quite good and free.

    You can find it here: http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

  • http://yourmacexpert.com Steven Klein

    I’ll second Bruce’s recommendation for CyberDuck. It’s free, but of excellent quality.

    I’ve owned several FTP programs over the years, including Fetch, Interarchy (aka Anarchie), and Transmit.

    I like Transmit a lot, and that’s what I use. But I bought Transmit before CyberDuck came out. If I hadn’t already paid for Transmit, I’d just use CyberDuck.

  • http://www.beckmanjm.com/software Jack Beckman

    I was using Cyberduck for awhile (even sent some money for it), until it started crashing repeatedly on start. I tend to use ForkLift more now, but I wanted to present a completely free alternative, and Filezilla has worked very well for me on Windows at work.

  • Calvin Carson

    Save some “scratch”. Now that is a term I haven’t heard for a while. Thanks for the tips on utilities. The “Duck” was one that I used to use as well. Funny, I have not had the need to use FTP in a while. Might be time to go back for a refresher.