Transference launched

Sun, 08 Jul 2007 18:38:53 +0100

Diffly took me, on and off, about three months to write. It was my first Cocoa app and I made a lot of mistakes and took quite a few wrong turns (most notably not starting with a Cocoa document architecture). By contrast my new application Transference has taken about a week, on and off, and was a much smoother project although I am beginning to question the wisdom of not using the Document architecture this time as well.

What is it? It's an alternative to Finder for something I do a lot of: copying and moving files.

Drag and drop is a marvellous thing but really Finder can be a pain to work with sometimes. Having to have multiple windows open, dragging the wrong things, losing selections, difficult selections, finding the right file, disappearing windows, the wrong folder springing open, Finder switching to another window after you drop, and so on, and so on. It seems Finder has myriad possibilities for making life awkward.

I tried PathFinder but where I was looking for simplification the guiding principle of PathFinder appears to be "more bells, more whistles." I'm sure it's a great file manager but it wasn't what I was looking for. Then it struck me that this was the kind of problem I enjoy solving and I needed more experience writing Cocoa applications. The end result is Transference:

It's a two-pane file copy & move utility. What it does it makes dead simple. What it doesn't do it leaves to Finder (although, inevitably, I am sure it will acrue some useful functions over time). The main features are:

Type paths right into the interface (and get path completion with F5 or Escape). It keeps a comprehensive history of source and destination paths that you can pick from. You can also browse, switch source & destination, etc...
Filter immediately. The interface has a search filter built right in to immediately narrow down the files you want to work with.
Sticky selection. Multiple selections in Finder is tricky at best. Transference uses checkboxes to select which files will be transferred.
Nothing else gets in the way!

The end result is that Transference is a lean, mean, file transferring machine!

Once again I am using Andy Matuschacks excellent Sparkle library to do automatic updates. I have also made Transference an open source project under the liberal MIT license and it's available right now from Google Code. If you try it, I hope you find it useful. If there's something missing let me know or, send me a patch :-)

Curiouser and Curiouser! on transference

Transference launched