November 2, 2003 21:03 | MacStuff

Crippled FTP in Panther

Why? Why do such a stupid thing?

Mac OS X 10.3 a.k.a. Panther allows you to FTP via the Finder. It makes it look like your are "mounting" the remote file system. Here's how:

Apple Key + K, ftp://yourhost.com, username and password

Works absolutely beautifully! Fast, fully Finder integrated. Yay! Oh joy! Not so fast. It's read only. Totally useless.

Why, Apple? Why do you make some things so good, and them some things in such a way that makes me want to get very violent with you. And i am not a violent person. ;)

Oh and while we're at it... why not let SFTP work? Make the world a better place!! And hello SCP?

End rant. I am not amused.

UPDATE:
It is obvious fromt he comments below that some people don't get it. I was merely saying it is stupid of Apple to develop a feature (that SOME of us may find useful) and then to cripple it.

All you CL commandos: good for you. Not for me. Thanks.

P.S.: I currently use Interarchy for FTP and Fugu for SCP and SFTP.

PLEASE refrain from commenting unless you have insight as to why Apple woul ddo such a thing. Thank you.

Comments
1- Juan Carlos de Burbon

Learn command line and stop whining.


This feature is not new. It was in Jaguar as well. Get a life. Download a full-featured FTP program or do it from the command line, as the previous poster suggested.


"Learn command line" Ohh, you are soooo cool. Why not make it simple and functional from the beginning? I think it's a very fair request and that it is fair to be bugged at it. Why would I learn command line, I don't give a f''k what is behind the scenes. Sure, call me lazy, I am.


Wow!
1- I do know command line FTP. But when I am trying to get REAL work done, why waste valuable brain CPU on that when anice GUI IS AVAILABLE but crippled? Apart from that, it's 2003. Not 1973.
2- I know the Feature was also present in Jaguar, in 10.0 nad 1.0 as well. And yet it is STILL crippled. My question stands: WHY?
3- I do use other FTP GUIs. They do just fine, been using them for years. However this Finder integration would be VERY nice. And VERY easy for Apple to do (duh they already DID it.. they just CRIPPLED it.

So Juan Carlos de Bourbon, perhaps you can answer the question instead of being a prat?


I agree with the author. I've been holding off on buying a commercial FTP program because I thought Panther would include real deal FTP. I am way disappointed. And, yes, I know how to use FTP from the command line (mostly) and it is a giant pain in the ass. I have better things to do with my time than try to remember if I am in ascii or binary mode. I bet you also know how to create directories and move files from the command line to. Still use the Finder? I thought so.


There are plenty of command line and free FTP clients that do not force you to remember modes or any other such trivia. Try NcFTP, for instance. Also, if you want free GUI-based FTP programs, try fink. It allows easy installation of many *NIX ported programs.

The command line _is_ where I do much of my work, BTW, as it is simply quicker than point-and-click, once you get used to it. And, before anyone comments, yes, I am a longtime Mac owner (1986).


"Why would they do such a thing?"

My best guess is to make the desktop mounting capability of the .Mac services (iDisk) more attractive.

Note that the iBlog software given away free with .Mac is similarly crippled. It will publish only to .Mac. The fully paid, full featured version of iBlog publishes to .Mac, FTP and other locations.

I would really love for FTP to my personal website to show up on the desktop and in Finder without using Interarchy. Until then, I prefer Transmit. Either way, an extra app and/or a different interface is required to do things that could and should be part of the Finder.

Bottom line, why should you have to use something other than the OS to browse, read and write a network disk. It is supposed to be a network disk operating system isn't it?


You say they developed it then crippled it. Maybe they never developed the write part in the first place. For a couple of reasons I can think of:

1. Plain (unencrypted) FTP is insecure and allowing WRITE would be foolish.

2. A read-only volume is probably way more efficient and reliable across a network (and probably the Internet), especially using FTP.

Get Interarchie, which supports SFTP and SFTP "disks". (I just tried it to make sure it works in Panther, but I believe our corporate firewall blocked me.)


Here are free alternatives, until Apple pulls their head out of their ar...mpits

LiFTP
http://www.liftp.net/liftp/

Fugu (for scp and sftp)
http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/

RBrowser Lite
http://www.rbrowser.com/RBrowserLite/RBrowserLite.html

FTP Thingy
http://homepages.tig.com.au/~cthulhu/modern/ftp_thingy/app.html


I've been using Panic Software's Transmit. Wonderful piece of software, that. I do wish Panther had introduced write access for desktop FTP, though. I assume they didn't because it would make iDisk (and thus, .mac) that much less valuable. Almost everyone has at least a few MB from their ISP that they could use to store files, so if FTP worked just like iDisk, why pay for iDisk?


Command line FTP works fine and isn't broken. That's a work around, not a solution.

I like my Mac because in general I am not forced to work around problems.

Mounting a remote FTP device is of course much more powerful that the limited access that CL FTP or a GUI based FTP provides. Doing big CVS exports to remote production serves comes to mind. This is how computers are supposed to work! A mounted FTP vlum provides a seamless integration with all your other apps..

I was really hoping this would work reliably in 10.3...

We want our FTP!


Where can I get the exact grammar to connect to an ftp server? I'm trying to connect to ftpfree.tin.it, but I don't reach the point where I'm asked for the user ID and Password.


the deal breaker is, if you can write to ftp through the finder you can use any text editor you choose and take full advantage of all it's features on remote servers.

for example, bbedit find & replace across an entire remote folder would be really cool. if you've ever used skEdit you would really really want write access in the finder.

so, yeah, thanks apple.


webdrive does this on windows - its great

what i find funny is that it used to work on mac os 9

silly


i absolutely agree with the author. ineterestingly enough: google for the topic, most of the mac users around start ranting immediately (mostly because they just don't get it, sometimes a GUI really cripples one'e ability to think abstract i suppose...). so much for better culture ;). Anyway, such a feature is absolutely crucial to my workflow; using netatalk on a rmote b ox an ssh'ing it isn't always feasible; forget about direct SMB sares. Absofuckinglutely forget about NFS (port mapping protocol, can't tunnel), forget about WebFUCKINSLOWdav. Burn in Hell for this, apple. Hoping for Tiger (Heck, this apple-company is in no way better than their fucking PC-counterpart). Sorry for swearing so much btw....

BTW: @jvc - wtf do you mean it worked in OS9? Gonna have to dig out classic mode again, eh? hehe..