The time has come to say farewell to what had previously been my favorite FTP program, Transmit. I started using Transmit because I was sick to death of Fetch, Cyberduck kept failing in the middle of transfers, and hey, thousands of fans can’t be wrong, right?

Of course, if I had been aware of Yummy FTP at the time, I could have saved myself $30. Unfortunately, I only discovered Yummy FTP a few days ago, but I am a solid convert now. Transmit was pretty solid; Yummy FTP is fantastic.

Although I was initially not impressed with Yummy (its interface is rather cluttered and nowhere near as streamlined as Transmit, or even Cyberduck), I tried it out because it was on sale at MacZot and because the feature list was a bit out of this world. So while I didn’t have love at first sight, I definitely had love at first use.

Yummy FTP is the fastest, most powerful FTP program I have ever had the pleasure to use. What it lacks in sparkle it more than makes up for in functionality. Yummy has snapped through beastly transfers that Transmit stumbled and choked on as if they were nothing. It isn’t a program for the FTP newbie; the power that it provides definitely would make the software confusing for a first-timer. But for someone like myself who uses FTP every day and needs a reliable and powerful tool, Yummy FTP is damn near perfect.

Not only that, but the developer is possibly the most responsive I’ve ever met. Before I registered the program I emailed the support email to ask about a couple features, and he replied almost immediately. I don’t think I’ve ever had a developer answer me that quickly, and certainly not in the middle of a sale and for someone who doesn’t even own the software. Then a few emails into the conversation he apologized for being so slow to respond because he was asleep. I hadn’t even asked a question; he was responding to an email that was basically all compliment.

Yes, he’s possibly crazy, but in such a wonderful way.

In any case, Transmit and I will be parting ways (perhaps one of these days I’ll write out a real comparison between the two pieces of software beyond my fan-boy ravings). I’ll leave it installed for a while, but Yummy FTP has stolen my heart. Farewell, Transmit. We had some good times.

Two of my favorite authors have released books within the last three days (within the last two hours for one of them):

Robin McKinley just released Dragonhaven, and Terry Pratchett just released Making Money. I haven’t read either one yet, but both are in the mail. Hot dang!

Also, I just discovered that Robin McKinley has a blog on LiveJournal. And I thought life couldn’t get any weirder.

In other news, Okkervil River’s new album The Stage Names is amazingly good, as is Stars’ new album In Our Bedroom After the War (both links lead to the iTunes store, but both albums are also available from eMusic; the bonus track on The Stage Names from eMusic is a great song, too).

I’m surprised how much great stuff has been coming out recently by authors and artists that I love. I’m behind on the times.

I’m pretty good about registering shareware. If I try a program and really like it, then I register it; operating system ease of use aside, indie developers are why I love the Mac. Out of the seven or eight programs that I always have running, only two are Apple software (Mail and iTunes). The rest are shareware (including such gems as LaunchBar, PathFinder, NewsFire, DeskShade, and MenuCalendarClock iCal).

However, I only recently registered MenuCalendarClock. I was only using the free features, and iCal integration wasn’t worth $20 for me. It was recently on sale at the MacUpdate Promo, though, so I picked it up as a thank-you to the developers (assuming they get any money from those deals at all). Before I registered it, though, I turned on some registered-only features to see how long I’d been running it unregistered:

908 days. 908 days. I think that’s some sort of personal record for me. The only rival is the amount of time I had Bubble Trouble unregistered back in the 90’s, but I think I still kept that under a year.

Apple just released the newest member to the iPod line: the iPod Touch, and I just gotta say: wow. Expected, but still wow. It’s basically an iPhone without the phone. Very sleek.

Even if I had the loose change, though, I don’t think I’d get one, and here’s why: 16 GB is the biggest model. I’m sorry, but my music library alone is 16 GB (sure I only listen actively to about half of it, but still). Add video on top of that, and I’d fill the thing without bering able to buy a single video over iTunes Wi-Fi.

I wish Apple would stop making expensive gadgets that are almost perfect enough to buy without thinking about it, but not quite. It just means I sit staring longingly at my screen way too often.

Via Daring Fireball:

17-Year-Old Unlocks iPhone

The teen estimates he spent 500 hours developing his technique, sometimes working until 9 am and then waking the next day at 4 pm to resume his work.

Obviously, anything that requires soldering is only going to appeal to a miniscule niche, so this isn’t really huge news. But there’s something admirable about a kid willing to put that amount of time into an obsessive project like this. Someone at Apple ought to line him up for an internship next summer.

Or find the kid a good psychologist.

From Wired, one of the biggest technology magazines that I know about. I subscribed to their RSS feed months ago, simply because every once in a blue moon something interesting pops onto the radar. Today I was titillated by this:

Hackers Take Down the Most Wired Country in Europe

My reaction after slogging through all five painful pages: what the fuck? Aside from being rife with typos (my personal favorite: they failed to capitalize the name of their own magazine on page four) and populated by nonexistent pictures, the article reads like a cheap action flick. We’ve got evil communists, bad-ass computer geeks, war propaganda, conspiracy, cyber-terrorism, total paranoia…you name it, it’s there.

Is this journalism? What the hell is wrong with the editors at Wired that they allowed this kind of crap to get published? I’m inclined to wonder if someone hacked Wired’s website and posted the article as some sort of off-color joke.

My god, I wrote satire and lies for four years, and it was better than this junk. I’m honestly tempted to unsubscribe from their RSS feed. If this kind of crap is their version of a “top story”, then I don’t really see a need to waste even the small amount of time it takes to skim their headlines every day.

Quite honestly, if I wanted to read poorly-done war propaganda I’d rather turn to Tod Holton, Super Green Beret than Wired magazine.

God, I love Tod Holton. If only I could unleash some magic monkeys on the Wired editors.

Alright, I’ll admit it; I’m a sucker when it comes to Stickies replacements. I’ve tried GTD programs and so forth, but when it comes to needing to jot down notes and to-do items, I often find myself returning to Sticky Notes (my current favorite, although development on it is pretty sporadic).

A new stickies program was just released called SketchBox, and although I haven’t tried it yet, it looks very cool. Aside from a very appealing interface, the program allows you to do three things: add text to stickies, attach reminders and alarms to stickies, and draw on stickies using a graphics tablet.

Very cool. I can think of all sorts of interesting uses for this program for artists, or anyone who likes to use graphics tablets. Sadly, I am currently tablet-less, but this is definitely a program to check out.