Etna, NH — Fetch Softworks announces the latest release of Fetch, the original Mac file transfer app. With new features designed to provider great control over the user’s files, this release continues the Fetch tradition of steady, relentless improvement, giving users improved control over their file transfer tasks.

Fetch now offers users better control over files. A simple but very useful way Fetch does this is by preserving the modification dates of uploaded files, making it easier to tell when a file on a server matches the local copy. Further, Fetch’s new Find field enables users to zero in on just the files they are working with.

Fetch now also helps users better monitor the progress of file transfers. While previous versions of Fetch reported the transfer progress of each individual file, it now displays the progress of the overall transfer, making it easier to see when the entire operation will be complete.

Finally, Fetch now makes it easier to use Fetch on multiple computers without having to manually update shortcuts on each one. Fetch introduces support for syncing Fetch shortcuts using Dropbox, enabling individuals and groups to access an up-to-date collection of shortcuts no matter which Mac they use.

Fetch 5.7 is compatible with Intel Macs running Mac OS X 10.5 or later, including Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, and can be downloaded from http://fetchsoftworks.com or from the Mac App Store.

Fetch is free to try for 15 days, and a single-user license is $29. Upgrades are free for Fetch 5.5 and Fetch 5.6 users and customers who purchased Fetch after January 28, 2009; otherwise, upgrades are $10. Free licenses and upgrades are available for educational and charitable use.

We’ve fixed a bunch of the bugs that you reported since the release of Roadshow 1.0 last month, and those fixes are now available in Roadshow 1.0.1.

The fixes:

• Added support for videos with missing MIME types
• Changed treatment of mute switch to be consistent with Videos app
• Fixed a bug that caused ads to be displayed incorrectly
• Fixed a crash when sharing a video by email
• Fixed a crash with QuickTime reference movies
• Fixed a problem logging into Radbox
• Fixed crash in tap-to-save on iOS 5.0b3
• Improved responsiveness while saving many videos
• Improved titles for videos found on Vimeo Watch Later page

Update today, and keep the feedback coming!

We are pleased to report that Fetch 5.6, the current release, works well with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

We have identified two compatibility issues that may affect some users:

• The Fetch Dashboard Widget does not work under Lion, and we recommend that users use droplet shortcuts instead.
• Due to a bug in Automator in Lion, users may see -1708 errors when opening or saving Automator workflows including certain combinations of Fetch Automator actions. We have reported this problem to Apple, and hope it will be addressed in a future system update.

Fetch Softworks today introduces Roadshow, a simple new way for iPad users to collect web videos to watch later, even without an Internet connection.

Until now, offline iPad users were offered no good way to view their favorite videos. Roadshow is the first app to offer a one-stop, all-in-one solution for offline web video viewing on an iPad.

“The Internet is bursting with great web videos: comedy, music, news, sports, lectures, and kittens being adorable, but until now iPad users had no good way to view their favorite videos when offline,” said Jim Matthews, president of Fetch Softworks. “With Roadshow, you can save the videos you discover on your favorite websites – such as Vimeo, Funny or Die, MSNBC, and thousands more – and play them back on your iPad whenever and wherever you'd like.”

Roadshow's all-in-one solution makes viewing videos on an iPad as easy as 1, 2, 3:

1. Browse favorite websites to find great videos.
2. Tap the videos to save when they appear on Roadshow’s found videos shelf.
3. Play back the saved videos anytime, anywhere — even when not connected to the Internet.

Roadshow also supports AirPlay with the new AppleTV, enabling users to enjoy their favorite videos on a big screen.

Due to Apple’s App Store rules, Roadshow does not support saving YouTube videos.

Roadshow is available in the App Store as a free, ad-supported app which will play up to 15 videos. Users can purchase the in-app Roadshow Unlimited upgrade for US$4.99 to remove the ads and the video limit.

If you have an iPad, and enjoy web videos, please check back on June 21, 2011. We’ll have exciting news to share about a new product from Fetch Softworks.

Etna, NH — Fetch Softworks is pleased to announce that Fetch 5.6, the latest version of the original Mac file transfer program, is now available from the Mac App Store.

Ever since pioneering the graphical Mac FTP client with its first release in 1989, Fetch has delivered unmatched simplicity and reliability to millions of users. The Mac App Store makes discovering and buying Fetch easier than ever before.

Fetch 5.6 supports FTP, FTPS and SFTP, the most popular file transfer protocols on the Internet, for compatibility with thousands of web hosting companies, publishers, pre-press companies and Internet service providers.

Fetch features include automatic restart of failed or stalled transfers, one-click editing of remote files with any application, Quick Look previews of remote files, folder mirroring, droplet shortcuts, automatic support for Zip, Tar, Gzip, StuffIt, and other common file formats, automating repetitive tasks with Automator actions and AppleScript recording, as well as extensive online help.

Pricing and Availability

Fetch 5.6 is available from the Mac App Store for US $28.99.

Fetch makes it easy to edit server files (using any application you like), but sometimes you don't want to open the file, you just want to take a peek at it.

Apple responded to a similar need in the Finder by introducing the Quick Look feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Tapping the space bar displays a preview of the selected file (or files), and tapping it again dismisses that preview. Quick Look can preview text, images, videos, audio, and many other documents, including those created by Microsoft Word and Excel. And the Quick Look system is extensible: as developers release Quick Look plugins, more and more file types are supported.

We've had Quick Look support in Fetch since releasing 5.5 last June. Just as in the Finder, tapping the space bar (or clicking the Quick Look button, or choosing the RemoteQuick Look menu command) shows a Quick Look preview of the selected file on the server. Of course Fetch has to download the file contents before they can be previewed, but that happens automatically (and Fetch remembers the file so that it doesn't have to be re-downloaded if you preview the file again). Double-clicking in the Quick Look window opens the file in the appropriate application.

Thanks to new support in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, we were able to improve Fetch's Quick Look behavior as of Fetch 5.5.2. Now, on Snow Leopard, you can switch back and forth between viewing a bunch of files as thumbnails or as a slideshow, and you can add previewed images to iPhoto.

One weakness we found with Quick Look in Fetch 5.5 has to do with its handling of text files. Quick Look does not support selecting text, so there is no way to copy a bunch of text out of the Quick Look preview in order to paste it in another application. To address this we added a View as Text command to Fetch 5.5.3. View as Text opens text files in separate windows, with support for selecting text.

Together, Quick Look and View as Text make previewing your files in Fetch easier than ever.

In How Reliable Is Reliable Enough? I wrote about the steps we took to make Fetch 5.5 more reliable, in particular its support for automatically resuming failed or stalled uploads. In the time since we released Fetch 5.5 we’ve heard from numerous users who’ve been helped by this feature. It is especially useful when transferring a large collection of files in many folders, for example a large web software package (e.g. WordPress or SugarCRM). In a big transfer there are hundreds of opportunities for one small part of the operation to stall or fail due to a server hiccup or network glitch. In versions of Fetch before 5.5, that would bring the entire transfer to a halt. Then you would be stuck figuring out what you still had left to transfer, or you might toss what you'd done and start over, just to be safe.

Fetch 5.5’s automatic resume feature fixed that problem for most uploads, but we heard about a few cases where it could do better. We also heard from users facing similar problems with large downloads. So in Fetch 5.6 we improved the performance for uploads, and extended the automatic resume feature to cover downloads as well. It also covers mirror transfers in either direction, and folder delete commands. We think we've eliminated nearly all of the common situations where a temporary glitch can cause a large operation to fail.

Please give Fetch 5.6 a try with your most challenging transfers, and let us know how it goes!

Etna, NH — Reliability is the watchword for Fetch 5.6, the latest version of the original Macintosh file transfer program, released today.

Transient errors or stalls can all too often cause a website update or large download to grind to a halt, wasting time and requiring tedious and error-prone manual intervention. Fetch 5.6 automatically resumes uploads, downloads, and mirror operations, to ensure that network glitches and server hiccups do not stand in the way of successful FTP or SFTP transfers.

Fetch 5.6 is a Universal binary, compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 or later, including Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and can be downloaded from http://fetchsoftworks.com.

Fetch 5.6 is free to try for 15 days, and a single-user license is $29. Upgrades are free for Fetch 5.5 users and customers who purchased Fetch after January 28, 2009; otherwise, upgrades are $10. Free licenses and upgrades are available for educational and charitable use.

My son Dylan is away at college, and on January 27 — the day of the iPad announcement — I was on my way to visit him when I noticed that I was walking by the campus bookstore. I flashed back to January 24, 1984, when I was a freshman at the same college, and had eagerly hurried into that same bookstore to witness the unveiling of Apple's new Macintosh computer. On both days it felt as if the world of computers was being made anew.

The announcement of the iPad, and the recognition by some (e.g. Steven Frank, Frasier Spiers and Dan Moren) that this represents a new era of computing, gives me a powerful sensation of déjà vu. Like the iPad, the Macintosh that Apple unveiled in 1984 was intended to radically simplify computing. Jef Raskin, who started the Macintosh project at Apple, believed that personal computers should be more like appliances: simple, rather than complicated, focused on specific tasks, rather than general-purpose. Raskin left Apple in 1982, but the idea of computer-as-appliance lived on in the Macintosh. If you wanted to write, you put in your MacWrite floppy disk and it became a word processing machine. If you wanted to draw, you put in your MacPaint disk and it became a digital sketchpad. Every application took over the entire screen, and turned the machine into a specialized device. In that way it was not so different from the iPhone of today (or the iPad of this coming April).

Raskin went on to create an even more appliance-like computer, the Canon Cat, which was a commercial failure. And the Macintosh itself only barely escaped an early demise. While Apple had planned to sell millions, the first year’s sales did not reach 100,000, and it was only the fortuitous emergence of desktop publishing that saved the Mac from cancellation. Over time the Mac acquired new features and capabilities, and new complexity, such that today we can look at it as an example of “Old World” computing that we hope to move beyond.

For the iPad to truly usher in a new age of user-centric computing it needs to succeed commercially, and it needs to avoid the creeping complexity that turned the 128k Mac into the MacBook Pro of today. There are reasons for optimism on both scores. Past efforts — the Mac, the Cat, and the Newton — tried to build a new world from scratch, offering no compatibility with existing platforms. As John Gruber has persuasively argued, it was that incompatibility more than anything else that doomed the Mac to its small market share. It is simply too difficult to sell a computer that forces consumers to throw away everything they have learned and done before. The iPad does not have this weakness: it builds on the iPhone, which in turn built on the iPod and iLife and Safari and Mac OS X, which in turn built on the classic Mac OS and NeXTSTEP. The Mac started with three applications (MacWrite, MacPaint, and Multiplan); the iPad will start with over 100,000. The iPad, like the iPhone, also starts with the web, the most critical and adaptable “application” of all.

The iPad will therefore not succumb to the usual new platform Catch-22 of having neither enough market share to attract software, nor enough software to build market share. But will Apple resist the temptation to add new features until an iPad requires as much training and expertise as a general-purpose personal computer? It’s much too early to tell, but the design decisions Apple has made to date suggest an encouraging restraint. They are helped by the fact that the iPhone and iPad can be huge successes without trying to be all things to all users. Customers who need a more flexible and complicated device can buy one, but most will be perfectly happy with an iPad. As new uses and technologies become mainstream Apple can incorporate them, while ensuring that the simplicity and usability of the platform is protected.

As a developer I have mixed feelings about this incipient new age. I remember when the U.S. telecommunications system was run by a benevolent monopoly, with awesome reliability and ease of use, and equally awesome resistance to change. Ma Bell imposed a narrow bottleneck for technological progress, a bottleneck that was ultimately smashed by the anarchic personal computer market. It was the wide-open personal computer that let hobbyist developers write and sell BBS systems, PPP drivers, and ultimately web browsers — without having to first ask permission. It is not difficult to imagine some great new idea dying because it can’t get through the App Store, or because the developer decides it is not even worth trying.

That said, I fervently hope that the iPad does represent a new world for computers. We developers build things to help people, but it is all too easy to focus on the things rather than the people. Today’s computers are wonderful, but they aren’t good enough for people. The iPad is another chance to do better.