We’ve gotten used to think that FTP applications should be simple, highly functional and powered by outdated and ugly user interfaces. Some people seem to think that a good FTP client is that app that comes with hundreds of features and doesn’t care about design principles and good practices just because it has to be functional, and functionality doesn’t play well with the eye candy. I think that an app meant of power users doesn’t have to exclude a great Mac-like UI design from its list of features- it’s the contrary: a full featured and complex app should find the right compromise between design and features.

It’s quite difficult to approach Transmit 4, the latest release from Panic, considering that is an application that comes with an immense amount of hype, possibilities and commands, being specifically meant for people who do file transfers like they drink water. Put simply, Panic has just released the ultimate file transfer app for Mac OS X. But delving deeper into it, there’s so much more to talk about.

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Back in January we talked about Zootool, a new web application that aimed at revolutionizing then way you collect and organize bookmarks on the web. I described Zootool as the best new webapp of 2010, and I still think that Bastian Allgeier’s creation is the most innovative and best designed new kid on the block this year.

Four months and hundreds of thousands of entries later, the Zootool community is still young, still growing and looking for more and better integration of the app with online services and devices. Zootool integrates with Twitter, Facebook and Delicious to share and backup your bookmarks, but people want a way to access Zootool from their Macs, iPhones and iPads. And while we know that an iPad version is in the works and maybe we’ll see a native iPhone counterpart someday, today Imprbbble has released the first official Mac client for the app called Zootool Offline.

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A couple popular tools for the Mac are Speed Download and Transmission, which allow you to manage downloads and harvest torrents quite easily. If you took both of these applications, ran it through a Windows (as in Microsoft) blender, and ported it back to the Mac, you’d get Folx.

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Hey all you soon to be Kiwi-heads! Before I even delve into such a review, we’re fully aware that Kiwi is currently one of the great sponsors that help keep our site up and running. In no way shape or form does Kiwi warrant or make endorsements as to the quality and content of the review!

So with that out of the way, we’re also fully aware that some of you are already touting Kiwi as your Twitter client of choice on your Mac machine. And these people also happen to be incredibly vocal about it. But for those a little leery of customization or other features Kiwi provides, let me show you around a bit. Even if you already own your copy of Kiwi, stick around anyway!

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Moving content around on the Mac can be incredibly easy or slightly annoying. Growing up on Windows, I’ve lived with the luxury of cutting documents before pasting them in the desired locations. Quite honestly, that’s still my preferred method of moving documents. By default, that’s absent on the Mac. And to be frank, I’ve never liked how the Mac has dealt with files and folders at all. This may seem absurd, but hear me out: To take a file from my documents, and move it into a folder hierarchy buried somewhere on my system (perhaps deeper in my documents), I either have to copy the folder then delete the original, or drag and drop. Copying, pasting, then deleting the original is a terrible way to go about things unless you’re working with text. Dragging and dropping can work okay, but it gets old when you have to go maybe five folders deep. There is no other absolute move command which cut solved.

The second problem with computers in general is screen real estate. On my laptop, every pixel counts. Dragging and dropping is made easier when you have two finder windows open, but again, it gets old having to resize windows each time. If you’re like me and you still haven’t moved to a third party application to manage your files and folders, then Fiwi can help solve the drag and drop dilemma.

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I have a late 2008 Macbook Pro, and one could argue that maybe it’s time for me to consider an upgrade to a new model. Maybe with some SSD and new processor goodness. I think that my machine is still a great one though, with its 4GB of RAM and a pretty capable hard disk: it’s been able to do so many things for me in these two years that I don’t see it being replaced anytime soon, actually. But, I think that’s a given that I should keep an eye on its internal stats: you know, stuff like the battery health, CPU usage over time and memory consumption.

I’ve always done that with the iStat Pro dashboard widget from Bjango (former iSlayer), but last night I decided to upgrade to iStat Menus 3. Here’s why you should do the same.

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The Mac draws a lot of attention from bloggers who love to create and share content. Great tools like Skitch, Little Snapper, SnapIt, Camtasia Studio, and Screenflow enable us to capture content as it appears on the screen, edit it, format it, and ship it across the Interwebs effortlessly. Separately, these tools are awesome in their own rights. Together, it’s possible to have a super app. Voila (version 3.0) for the Mac takes a little of everything from these mastered tools, and brings them together into a one stop shop that should hopefully attend to all your needs. How do we feel about it? Read past the break to find out.

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Floating between contacts in GMail and maintaining a carbon copy of those recently added contacts on my Mac has become somewhat of an evening chore. Believe me, manually adding the same contacts to multiple devices over and over again bites. But with Syncman, it’s easy to keep your GMail and Address Book in sync nirvana. Read more

There are two kinds of desktop applications: those that work and require you to pay attention to them, and those that work and you don’t even notice them.

I have many applications on my Mac, many of them for reviewing purposes, but I tend to keep a very few in the dock and some running in the menubar. Of all these applications I have most of them belong to the first category, they are apps that require me to look at them and perform actions basing on their user interface. 1Password needs me to input some letters in a text field to unlock its database, and Cyberduck wants me to select the proper folder to upload pictures. My action is needed, always and immediately. Without my action, these applications are lost like an empty car. I have to drive them to go somewhere (working with them), but I also had to learn driving them in the past to get used to their system.

Then there are applications that live quietly in the background, do their job without requiring my attention and are there when I need them. From a technology standpoint, they’re not that different. I use these “quiet” apps just like I use the other ones. But from a user point of view, there’s an immensely huge advantage when using the quiet apps: even if you actually use them, you don’t notice them. So I guess that their biggest feature is that of melting with the OS and become an invisible layer of your workflow.

Clipmenu is an application I’ve been using for many years now and, just like the Finder or Mail, is an application I’m highly dependent on, mainly because it’s become so well integrated with the OS that I don’t even notice using it anymore. Any Mac that doesn’t have Clipmenu installed doesn’t feel like a real Mac to me.

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