A free FTP client ro rival the best commercial apps?
As everyone at open-inn knows I am a big advocate of the world of FOSS but i still find myself having to use windows for some tasks (mainly latest versions of dreamweaver and photoshop).
Despite this I am relentless with my mission to find decent (if not better) alternatives to the commercial apps i use and for a long time one of the things I could never replace was my trusty FTP program, CuteFTP from Globalscape….until now..
Ok, so gftp and LOADS of other foss ftp programs have been around for ages BUT i always found cuteftp the most intuitive gui compared to any other ftp apps (and I include commercial ones in that statement).
Then one fateful day several months ago I came across Filezilla, an open-source ftp client (and server if you want it) that blew my socks off. Running over 250 websites for various clients I use ftp more than most people i know so for me speed and decent gui is essential.
Filezilla does everything you would expect from an ftp client (ftp, ftps, sftp, resume, folder comparing etc http://filezilla-project.org/client_features.php) but the thing that impressed me the most was the level of attention that was given the the gui design.
I regularly export my site settings to my dropbox as a straight xml file so i can access all my sites from any pc i like without any hassle though any sensitive ones are not stored/exported (I use Keepassx to keep contorl of my passwords but ill post on that seperately cos thats awesome and foss too!)
Im not going into the specifics here as you can check the project website for that info but its available as Windows & Mac binaries and GNU/Linux source is also available so it should run on anything. Ubuntu includes it in the repos but I found quite a few of the gui features (like synced browsing and quite connect button) were missing from the repo version compated to the latest source tarball.
So why not head over to http://filezilla-project.org/ and install it, or do a the following old trusty (if you are on ubuntu).
sudo apt-get install filezilla
This post isnt a technical review of the app just another notch of my foss bedpost. Enjoy….
