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Less than a few hours hold and we've already gotten our first review of FTPeel. My favorite part?

Then disaster struck!

I should have stressed it in my earlier entry, but FTPeel is pretty rough, even by "public beta" standards. After all, Safari seems to be setting the tone for public betas these days, right? 🙂

That having been said, Clint raises some good points, and certainly ones we'll be addressing. I'll talk about them more in the bigger version.

I like to talk about the "negatives" because, well, there's not much we can do about the positives, now is there?

Clint mentions the column view, and that he likes it, but I should point out that it's something that we're working to improve. It doesn't support drag and drop or a few other keyboard shortcuts right now, and we're looking to improve that.

Clint then mentions some problems with the MagicMirror:

There were two things I found awkward about the mirror setup. First, I found it confusing that I had to provide my site's details again to set up the mirror. FTPeel remembers site configurations in the main connection dialog as bookmarks but it doesn't seem to know anything about those here. Support for pulling those bookmarks when setting up a mirror would be convienant.

We're thinking of setting up every bookmark as a MagicMirror automatically (but disabled - requiring the checking of a box and the definition of a local folder). This will require some changes to how we store bookmarks. They may become files instead of preferences, probably in ~/Library/Application Support/FTPeel/, but we'll see.

I should point out that we put FTPeel out there without documentation on purpose. I think it really tests the intuitiveness of the app. If people don't need the documentation, then you've got an easy-to-use app on your hands. If they find something troubling, you have work to do. Clearly, we have work to do. But we didn't expect not to!

Then disaster struck! I took the screenshot you see above and put it in the folder "mySite" and dragged it again to the FTPeel icon, hoping it would simply see that the other files had not changed, but still upload the new file. However, after connecting to the site it seemed to get stuck and I was greeted with a spinning beachball of death.

That's something we're looking to fix. We botched the MVC (model-view-controller) model a little, and that's been exacerbated by a later change. Regardless, he's right, and this problem will pop up for some others as well. Another problem we've discovered in this public beta: MagicMirrors don't always work below the root level of a site. Embarrassing as all get out, given that this is one of our "big features," but one we'll fix shortly.

Lastly, Clint is right about those .DS_Store files. We should ignore them. It's my belief that the damn file system shouldn't even return those in the list of files, because I find myself accidentally committing them to CVS and all sorts of places all the time, and they're as "local" a file as there seems to be, aren't they? Anyway, also something we'll fix.

Thanks to Clint for the review. We like criticism - it helps us to improve our software. Expect public beta 2 to address these issues (and more).

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