Speech impediment as the perfect FTP client.

I’ve been on the lookout for a good Windows FTP app ever since LeechFTP made its last public appearance in 1999. Rejoicing time is upon us for today one of the designers at GMAP put me on to FFFTP.

FTP-wise I’ve tried a handful of apps over the last three or four years. I’d settled on SmartFTP for most of the heavy lifting, though it does have a lot of cruft I don’t need and I really loathe its weirdo “address – username” pulldown with accompanying incomprehensible dialog boxes.

FileZilla is promising, but kept startling me with random stability quirks. Likewise checked out CoreFTP “Lite”, which has a really great view-toggle feature going on, as well as an incessant per-directory-click-activated beep which, I suppose, is designed to encourage full version purchasing or else irritating beep-induced madness.

WebDrive was a favorite for quite awhile, though has also proven to be unstable when asked to cooperate with Vista. Plus, WebDrive can be overkill when you just want to quickly pop a file through the ether and be done with it.

FFFTP is cruftless and light and includes the better features of more “advanced” FTP clients; specifically firewall jockeying and even auto Japanese encoding conversion. Nice.