Fantastic app, instabuy. I'm really happy to see these kinds of native Mac apps being successful for so long. They're a breath of fresh air amidst all the Electron crap lately.
Agreed. I get that it's easier to build a singular cross platform app using a JS framework, but the decrease in quality from a well done native app really shows. I'm looking at you Spotify, todoist, Slack and others
You can pry Electron-based VS Code from my cold, dead hands. I'm grateful that it's cross-platform and available on Linux - I have pretty much stopped using a fully paid-for PyCharm, which I previously considered the best IDE. Being "native" is overrated, seeing that my top 2 IDEs are both not native apps, or look at any JetBrains product.
I still think it's possible to build good non-native apps, but it's hard and you need to pay attention to details.
I've written a logviewer with electron. Getting the custom painted table-component and column-reordering to look and feel like Finder or iTunes tables was at least 10 hours of work.
Working on memory allocation so that javascript GC wouldn't introduce lags now and then was another 5 hours.
(That is the main performance problem with non-native apps, I think.)
Qt programming is done in C++ or Python and it includes everything required inside the distributed app package. It's also easily skinned to look very close to native UIs (see VLC).
I've never used both of these languages and wrote only simple things in JS but I would spend a week learning Python syntax and Qt features to deliver a better UX and performance for a cross-platform app.
I don't understand the allergy that so many developers have (in my experience) to subscription software. Software is never finished, golden master style distribution ends up orphaning huge swaths of customers across major updates, and most of the cost of software maintenance is continuous. Continuous income via subscription services goes a long way toward solving these issues.
Because I don't need the latest and greatest of every single piece of software, but subscriptions are always priced as if I do.
"Look, you save 25% versus buying our old yearly releases every year!" they say.
But I wasn't going to buy all their yearly releases. Most software I use isn't my main workhorse. I was perfectly happy running old Adobe software for years, even after high DPI screens came out and it didn't support them. So what really happened is they took my purchase-every-five-years plan and jacked the price up 300% for stuff that I don't need.
Being required to pay for updates that I don't want (and the current version stops working entirely if you stop paying for it) takes away any pricing segmentation and tends to be a terrible deal for hobbyists.
If you're a creative professional maybe Creative Cloud is a great bargain. But it isn't for me, and neither is a $10/month FTP client. So props to Panic for not going that route.
Because it strips away your right to "own" software. Transmit 4 still works, and I can choose to pay for an upgrade if I wanted to. Transmit 5 is faster, nicer looking, and has more features, but I don't suddenly lose access to Transmit 4 by not upgrading. Charge me and upgrade fee and make versions, don't do a subscription.
In fairness, a lot of "digital distribution platforms" or online services do this as well.
Prime examples I've seen:
Google closing someone's account for using not their real legal name on Google+, locking away access to his music, documents, e-mail, and photos, all of which he'd migrated to his Google account.
Steam closing someone's account and basically cancelling a thousand dollars of "purchased" games because he broke their ToS, which makes you wonder what the difference is between purchasing and purchasing (via Steam) when the price is the same but your recourse is not.
Not true of two big (and expensive) ones I use: Adobe and Autocad. I used to upgrade every couple of versions. This has ended up costing me way more. But I still pay it because I need the software. So I guess they win...
Another way to look at it is that they were going to raise the cost anyways, at least now you get updates when they're production ready instead of every two years.
>I used to upgrade every couple of versions. This has ended up costing me way more. But I still pay it because I need the software. So I guess they win...
So my post makes perfect sense. They were going to raise the price on you anyways, so you were going to pay more either way. With the new pricing model you're paying more and getting versions you might have otherwise missed.
I'd much prefer a hybrid model. Happy to pay $30 or so for a single version and then $1-$2/mo for updates. If I stop paying at least I have something.
The app Gameshow by Telestream works like this and I really like the model. It's $35 and you get one year of updates. After a year you either stick with whatever the last point release was or you pay another $35. I wish Adobe software was like this.
That's how Jetbrains' licensing works: if you buy an annual license you get a perpetual license for that version; if you pay monthly you get a perpetual license after 12 months.
SQLyog is the same way. My only wish is that they would release a native Mac version. The last time I upgraded, I went with a 5-year upgrade plan because of how much I appreciate the software and the team behind it.
I like JetBrains's licensing model for doing this. You get a perpetual fallback license after subscribing a certain length of time, or you can keep subscribing and get updates.
I just realized I like this model too. Though it seems like they never include serious security updates. So I have this sort of subscription for a php web app. I'm kind of forced to pay for updates because of security.
Just to add to the chorus of "you have nothing when you stop paying" / "it keeps working after they release v2", etc, let me toss in:
If the company shuts down (or gets acquired or simply stops supporting the software), subscription software stops working. Paid usually does not.
I've outlived too many useful products, and lost them entirely. I expect to continue to do so for a lot longer, so I avoid subscriptions-for-non-hosted-software like the plague it is.
I can see a business sense for subscription software. They have an aversion to capital expenditures and much prefer operational expenditures. It helps them scale up and down and stay nimble.
As an individual, I really don't like having to constantly make a judgement call if I'm still getting value out of my recipe manager or my disk usage analyzer. Most of the development was done up front, as with the risk in developing it. There's also not really continuous updates or a lot of new features always needed.
When people sit down to budget, the first things people ask about are reoccurring expenses that can be minimized or eliminated; cheaper cellphone plan, cutting out daily lattes, cable bill--even investment fees. They easily sneak in and add up over time.
I would be fine with a subscription model if the customer service was actually better as you seem to claim the model provides.
I recently had an issue importing a logbook using arguably the most popular iOS pilot logbook app and it took a week. A WEEK! For the them to attend to my support request. A week could be 30 hours worth of flights for a pilot depending where they work.
Why do you need almost $100/year from me if you can't answer one email in 48 hours?
I've been dreaming of an open source logbook setup ever since this experience. I wish I didn't have to rely on $100/yr subscriptions to be locked into something so critical to my career.
I wish pilots flew for free so I don't have to pay so much for something that's so critical to my career. What's wrong with you? Do you genuinely believe that stuff like open source (especially critical one) should be created and maintained for free? By who?
He said that he pays every year money on something that didn't work and the support took ages. that was his problem....
Now I assuming that if he had a opensource logbook he could quickly find out what the problem was himself without relying one someone else.
Maybe the right counter argument would be that 100$ is not sufficient to provide a SLA to handle his support request whithin a shorter timespan. It should be prices higher ;) If this app is so critical for him I assume again the OP wouldn't mind paying it.
I tend to agree but think some developers do consider certain software "finished" and a subscription model adds undue pressure. Whether that model makes sense really depends on the type of software, its user base and the developer themselves.
Software may not be finished, but I may not care about the design roadmap. Version 3.5 might be feature-complete for my specific needs. Let me compensate you for that snapshot. Then let your power users fuel your continued development.
So let's assume that for a particular app the costs between a "one time purchase" and "subscription" would be exactly the same:
for example, a subscription of $1/month vs purchasing a new app exactly every year for $12.
Here's the difference:
- People who no longer use the app, will forget about it and the subscription will keep going for some time, which means free $ for company.
- People who don't really need the new features of the app and normally would not re-buy it (perhaps the Developer neglected renewing the app and it only has minor changes) still get it and pay for it through the subscription.
I honestly can't think of a single advantage of subscriptions for customers.
I will never, ever, ever pay for subscription-ware. I don't mind it being offered as an option but the crap that companies like AgileBits is pulling is ridiculous.
One of my favorite Mac app companies (along with The Omni Group and, more recently, Affinity). I always know I'll be paying for quality, polished software with Panic, and I've been looking forward to this Transmit update.
Their entire interface and UX persona reminds me of better times when skeuomorphic design reigned supreme. Now all we get is boring flat with single color highlights. Transmit 5 looks fantastic!
The funny thing is, there was never anything strictly skeuomorphic about the old versions of Transmit either - Panic has just always had an engaging approach to UI design, independent of trends.
Took a look into the source of the OS that I'm reading the Panic web page on. Absolutely disgusting that there's over 1.5M lines of code _in the kernel alone_. This is the kind of software bloat that is the death of our industry.
Transmit has always been slick, but it seems like Cyberduck[1] might have stolen a fair chunk of their clientele? I find it pretty useful on macOS (and/or things like yafc and ncftp on Linux).
I recently switched from Cyberduck (and a Transmit trial) to Forklift. Night and day difference. S3 on Transmit was terrible, and the application seemed a little plain in features in comparison.
There is nothing wrong with it. But for me it still crashes too often and as I said: Transmit is a lot faster if you have to transfer a large amount of files.
It still does. Google Cloud Storage isn't supported by Transmit.
To be honest I'm disappointed by these file transfer apps. One common use case is to backup your local files, but none of these apps support pausing/resuming transfers after sleeping a laptop.
I'm looking for the equivalent to Backblaze software, but for any cloud storage service. Arq is close but it has mandatory encryption and compression, which makes you dependent on software to be able to restore. Sigh.
Used it when I switched from Fetch[0] back in the day when PHP code was deployed with FTP. Great client, definitely the most "native" feeling FTP app I've used. Now I mostly use it for S3, which is very well supported.
Funny how much git changed how we do things. Transmit was one of the apps that I've always had opened on my laptop, and now haven't touched it at all for more than a year.
The Panic app I really miss is Audion. The Winamp-alike app that very nearly got bought by Apple to be rebadged as a little music player called 'iTunes'...
I've got an old PPC G3 Pismo laptop, and when I fire it up I always run Audion to play some music while typing. Loved the skins, I kinda wish the "Delicious Generation" of Mac interfaces would make a comeback. I think this was the default Audion UI:
What timing! I was just telling my coworker this morning that Transmit was the best money I ever spent on tools I use for web development. I've been using Transmit for a long, long time and I still feel like I haven't fully utilized it.
I've been a fan all the way since the beginning... I'll buy this even though I don't even use FTP and whatnot much anymore. Just for the extreme value this app gave me many years ago when I was getting started.
I couldn't perform any operations on S3 buckets due to this issue. If you are going to be in the business of building a client on top of a third-party API with no defined long-term protocol or RFC, you should be in the business of providing ongoing support for it too.
Transmit spent so long developing v5 and didn't provide this (important) update to any v4 users even when it was present for around 2-3 years.
Let's hope they provide better support, for all the other new services they have added, going forward.
This app store thing just burned me pretty bad when I cleared my machine and did not back up Airmail 2. When I went back to install it, It was no longer on the app store and I was informed that there was no way to get it again unless I paid for Airmail 3.
This is where just having a license key and a dmg somewhere is preferable.
I love Transmit, and version 4 served me well, but I've used it less and less over the years to the point where I don't think I'm the target market, as a web developer, anymore. I wish I had a reason to use this, but I can't find one.
I agree; however, it's invaluable if you use S3 or the like to manually backup files you never want to lose. Arq, for example, works great to backup your entire computer/server, but I like have a manually curated backup.
I wish there was a universal file-transfer app like this on Windows & Linux. The best cross-platform solution I know of is FileZilla, and even that (1) only does FTP/SFTP, leaving out S3 and all the other services and (2) features some utterly baffling design decisions (ahem: https://trac.filezilla-project.org/ticket/2914) that make it more or less unusable for serious work.
When I moved to a Mac (2004/5) Transmit was one of the first bits of software I purchased. It was a bit of a revelation to discover that software could be so lovely- it really added to the joy of using a new machine.
Having said that, nothing was ever as fast as LeechFTP I used on Windows [http://www.leechftp.de]. That thing was magic - no ftp client has ever felt so fast.
Glad to see them offer more cloud options (in addition to s3: Google, Dropbox, etc). While perhaps Transmit is "prettier", in recent years there have been many more complete offerings from their competitors.
Looks like they've made some S3 enhancements (which is my primary use). I hope they updated with support for KMS-encrypted files.
I bought Transmit 3 in 2006, and upgraded to Transmit 4 in 2010. It's always been a shining example of extremely well supported, well designed Mac software.
I bought Transmit 4 in 2011-ish and was happy with it. The major missing feature (IMO) was segmented downloading. I switched to lftp and never looked back.
Arq forces your files into their own proprietary (although open) containers, which are always encrypted. Being paranoid is nice and all, but it makes it impossible to log in into your cloud storage provider and browse your files or share a public link to one of your files.
Arq is atrocious for backups, but that doesn't seem to be its main use case.
FINALLY. So frustrating having to wait all of this time. I couldn't get a definitive answer from them on whether a Trasmit 4 license purchased at present, would be eligible for a Transmit 5 upgrade.
It's spelled out clearly on the order page – there's no special upgrade pricing, unless you bought v4 on or before June 1st, 2017, in which case it's free.
Yes, thank you. That was not there PRIOR to Transmit 5, for the past 6+ months. I wanted to purchase it, and if I did in May, I'd be paying twice for 4 and 5 in a two month time frame.
