I use Transmit from Panic as my main app for interacting with Amazon S3 buckets and SFTP servers. I use the command line for both of those services plenty as well, but sometimes it’s nice to just drag and drop and look at things visually.
Using S3 and SFTP is not a thing that everyone needs to do.
Transmit has another trick up its sleeve that I use all the time– Dropbox and Google Drive support.
The Dropbox app is terrible, and frankly, so are most cloud storage applications. What used to be “just” a folder on my Mac that I could trust to get synchronized to the cloud and all of my other devices became a resource hog and a UX nightmare. Frankly, I just don’t use “cloud storage as my file system” the way I think these things are intended. Instead, Dropbox and Google Drive are largely places where other people share files with me and vice versa. As it turns out, 99/100 times when I’m working in this setup, I don’t need constant two-way syncing. Instead, I just want to download something someone shared with me or upload something to share with someone else. So I added my Dropbox and Google Drive accounts to Transmit, dumped their apps, and happily upload and download files.
For example, my band records all of its rehearsals. I recently bought us a Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 3rd Gen – they’re being blown out now that the 4th gen has been released– and one of the other band members hooks that up to a laptop he brings. We record to Ableton directly, and after practice he cuts up the tracks and uploads them to folder in Google Drive shared with all of us.
Anyone who has used Google Drive knows what a mess it is to find anything and how bad the interface is for large files that it doesn’t know how to preview– like the wav files we record. It’s exceptionally easy to just open up the folder in Transmit, drag and drop, and have all the files locally.
At least it used to be exceptionally easy to do this. But Google have decided to put insane requirements on any developer who wants to support using its APIs, especially around Google Drive. This is messing with both Transmit and iAWriter.
Sigh. Google Drive continues to be one of the worst experiences on the web, and I guess that’s simply never going to change. Unfortunately, it seems my escape hatch has been closed.