One of the (increasingly few) benefits of an Apple .Mac account is the iDisk—space on Apple's servers for hosting your website, sharing files or iCal calendars, saving backups, and displaying iPhoto-made photo albums, etc. The Mac OS X Finder mounts your iDisk using the WebDAV protocol, but it does so at a depressingly lethargic pace. Most of my interaction with iDisk involves prolonged periods of observing that all-too-familiar spinning beach-ball. I'm pleased to report that there is a faster, yet still Finder-like way, of working with an iDisk.
Transmit is an FTP client from Panic Software. I used to use an earlier version to manage a website stored on an FTP server, but this was not capable of opening and browsing WebDAV servers. As my site is current hosted on .Mac I have been using the Finder to mount, browse, and drag-and-drop between my iDisk and my desktop. Recently the slow pace of interaction has become a real issue; I decided to look at alternatives.
Also of interest, receiving favourable comments in online fora (or forums's if you prefer), were Cyberduck (free), Goliath (free), and Yummy FTP ($US25). Of these only Goliath joined Transmit in being able to access WebDAV servers, but the interface was not to my taste.
I tried it out and decided to upgrade to Transmit 3. I'm not going to review it here but rather highlight two things which make it a winning product for me as a .Mac user. Firstly, as mentioned you can use it instead of the Finder to manage files on your iDisk with, in my experience, a noticeable and very welcome increase in speed. Choose Favourites > iDisk > My iDisk, enter only your .Mac username and password, and navigate the iDisk file tree. Right-clicking (or Control-clicking) displays a menu for file operations:
Secondly, in Transmit's Preferences you can configure the app to default to opening your iDisk (or the Sites folder thereof) automatically on launch. You can also set double-clicking to open a file in an editor of your choice. A long-time fan of BBEdit, this means I can double-click the XHTML files in my Sites folder and save them back to the "live" server to see the effect. Again, BBEdit seems to have less trouble doing this via Transmit than it does via desktop mounting of the iDisk in the Finder:
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