AAUG Reviews

by Dave Enders, AAUG Member

Conflict of interest disclosure: Fetch Softworks has provided a free copy of Fetch to me for the purposes of the review.

Fetch is a MAC OS X Snow Leopard compatible FTP Client. FTP is short for File Transfer Protocol. Wikipedia describes that FTP was developed to exchange and manipulate files over a TCP/IP network. In the recent years, web browsers like Safari and Firefox have made downloading files from the internet easy and less complicated for most users. Mobile Me takes this interface of transferring files to an even higher level and all the technical stuff happens in the background kinda like magic !

So why use an FTP client like Fetch ? Well I use Fetch at least a few times a month to upload the graphic files for the reviews done by AAUG members. Fetch allows me to place the files in specific directories on our blog. The part I am most excited about is that it fully scriptable via AppleScript. So over the few years I have been posting the reviews, I have been automating the process of uploading the product reviews. By being able to script the process, reduces human entry error and actually speeds the process up immensely. Fetch is an integral part of the review posting process. I had been using another FTP client, but it wasn’t quite ready upon the release of Snow Leopard and the AppleScript dictionary has been removed from it for the time being. I contacted Fetch Softworks and they were generous to provide a copy for review as well as use to continue our postings. In fact their generosity is extended by providing licenses to educational and charitable organizations.

Getting Fetch to work with my existing scripts took a few hours of work, I am not and expert by any means, and they provide some examples to glean information from.

A list of Fetch’s extensive features can be found here.

What else do I like about Fetch :

- The GUI of Fetch is very clean and simple.
-Fetch also includes Automator actions so if you still want to automate but are not skilled in AppleScript you can use these actions to help you along. In fact I have a workflow that does just that.
- Fetchworks had it ready for Snow Leopard release.

What I would like to see added:

Add variable support to Automator.

In closing, I highly recommend Fetch to anyone requiring a FTP Client for Mac OS X.