ForkLift is designed to be the fastest, most powerful file manager for the Mac. Connect to FTP or SFTP servers, manage your Amazon S3 account or your mobile devices over Bluetooth. All these features are beautifully integrated into a sophisticated, yet easy to use Cocoa based interface. Dual-pane view will dramatically increase your productivity along with state-of-the-art features like live preview, spring loaded folders and any-to-any workflow. All this to be topped by tabs, to keep your workspace nice and clean.

Truth to be told I am not sure exactly what I think of Forklift ($29.95). I feel that I should like it as it does most of the things that it claims to. It is also very much one of the “applications of the moment” in terms of reviews and hype, and it integrates with that other ‘must have’ of the week an Amazon S3 account. On the other hand I am becoming increasingly ‘old and grumpy’ about the disposable nature of the market at the moment, and the “It’s just $30″ type of argument.

Let me try and explain ……..

I use Yummy ($25) as my FTP client. I have used it for ages now and it does everything I think I want. Sure I am not a pro level user but I hammer it pretty hard most days.

From day one of owning my Mac I have used AppZapper ($12.95) to delete unwanted or unused applications and keep things tidy. Sure certain applications need a uninstaller to be cleaned up totally and others require some tidying up of the library but that is always going to be the case.

For burning DVD’s I use Disco ($29.95) which does a pretty good job of splitting large files over a number of DVD’s.

So that is $67.90 invested in applications already that if I purchased ForkLift I would be making redundant. So my logic is that this cost needs to be added to the ForkLift cost making ForkLift $97.85, as that is the real cost to me of dumping.

So the real question becomes is ForkLift worth $100?

Now of course if you don’t have an FTP client already, use the Burn option in the Finder and have just let your applications accumulate then you don’t have the same ‘issue’ but I would venture to say that you don’t have the need either for something like ForkLift, so my argument still holds good in my book. And before you think I am picking on ForkLift I have exactly the same view of Transmit ($29.95)!

So the only thing that I can’t currently do with my applications that ForkLift will do is my Amazon S3 backups. Well two points¨:

Paul wrote a great post on how to do this

Do I really need it when for over a year I have happily dragged the html folder over to my Mac as a back up and used wp BackUp to secure the content, which is basically all created in Mars Edit so is backed up there as well

So do I like it? Yes I do!

Do I need it? I really don’t think so. By way of examples take two really cool features, droplets and Split-Combine. Basically droplets allows you to preset certain actions and have an icon on your desktop. This was actually pretty useful and good fun, until I got fed up with the clutter on my desktop! Split-Comine is a very efficient way of splitting really (really) large files and determining how you want them spread over your DVD/CD. Again, very cool but at the end of the day Disco does that well enough for the very rare occasion that I have more data to transfer to DVD than space on the DVD.

The dual pane is ‘old hat’ to be honest, every FTP client has it. Sure it is more productive but it isn’t revolutionary. Whatever you may want or think it will not do away with the Finder, you are still going to be stuck with that whichever way you turn.

By now I wanted a second opinion so as I asked Danny what he thought:

Initial Impressions

Bit daunting

Big window

Very different to Finder

Wishes

Hover over to reveal long file names

Double clicking on volumes/folders opened in Forklift not Finder

A way of specifying an opening location for both panes

Best Features

Droplets worked well

Dual pane interface is exceedingly useful, so are tabs.

Conclusions

Good at what it does – FTP, file management

Not a Finder replacement ‘ Finder can’t be shut down

So there you have it, nothing at all wrong with it, but a suspicion that it is somewhat over hyped, and probably doesn’t give you that much more than you already have, especially for the potential total cost associated with the purchase.

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