A WinSCP replacement for the Mac

About half a year ago I wrote a piece on the inability to use my iMac as a web development machine. The reason was very simple: the lack of a utility on OSX with a feature set similar to WinSCP on Windows. It doesn't need to have all features of WinSCP, but at least being able to browse a remote SSH/SCP file system as if it is local and being able to edit remote files without being bothered too much by the latency and remote-ness are a must-have for me.

Apparently I'm not the only one looking for something to replace good old WinSCP on OSX, as this post is one of the most viewed and most commented on this site. In the comments visitors suggested many replacements: Cyberduck, Fugu, Smultron, Filezilla and Transmit. I tried all of them.

But none of these tools seem to do what I want, as -until last week- I still found myself at my XP laptop whenever I wanted to work on a site. Until last week? Yes, because about a week ago my trial license of Transmit ran out. And although it's no WinSCP replacement, Transmit is a decent SCP program. So I went to the vendor website to see what it would cost. On the website I ran into their "One-window web development" program, called Coda. After all the tries one more couldn't hurt, so I decided to give it a go.



After installing Coda you have to get used to the fact that it is not a WinSCP clone. So it doesn't have a dual pane Norton Commander like interface, but instead just has the list of remote files on the left hand side. And when you open one of those files -instead of getting the WinSCP editor popup- Coda opens the files in a large panel on the right hand side. Open a second file and it adds a tab on that panel, where WinSCP would open a second popup window.



Looking at it like that, it seems like Coda tries to mimic an IDE more than anything else. But then an IDE for remote web site development, which is exactly what I use it for. I'm now about half-way through my trial period for Coda and I must say I love it so far.

The file transfers are incredibly fast, way faster than with WinSCP it seems. They're also handled more gracefully. With WinSCP file transfers are handled in the main window, which is typically covered by my editing popup. So I have to alt-tab to the main window to see whether the transfer is complete. With Coda the file transfer is indicated by a throbber animation on the file listing on the left. When the transfer is complete, a brief notification animation is shown in the top right.

The editor is decent enough for my needs. It highlights most of the languages you typically encounter during web development and it follows most standard editing conventions. But it could do with some more keyboard shortcuts for faster editing and especially navigation. It also would be nice if it could integrate with external or online help files for supported languages. There's tons of great documentation out there for Java, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc. Unfortunately Coda limits its built in help system to the help that comes with the installation. So for anything beyond that, I still need to tab to my browser and search for the help there. This seriously breaks their "one-window web development" mantra and should be addressed if they want to stick to that claim.

That said: you might notice that the editor has lots of features that the internal WinSCP editor doesn't have, so I shouldn't be complaining. Syntax highlighting is great of course, as are other features like the overview of functions in the current file. The fact that I'm asking for features that you'd normally find in real IDE's and not in WinSCP are actually a big compliment to the Panic people: Coda really feels like a web development IDE!

The biggest downside of Coda I've found so far is the price tag. Like pretty much all software on the Mac it's commercial. Panic decided to set the price tag to $79. Which definitely doesn't make it an impulse buy for me. So I'll evaluate it a bit longer and see what happens when my trial runs out. I'll probably go back to my XP laptop and WinSCP. But if I then find myself missing Coda features, I'll give in and buy it. After all... that would mean it's better suited to my WinSCP. Who would have ever thought that would be possible?

Why is there no WinSCP for the Mac?

Ever since Mac OSX came out, I understood that the Mac is the dream machine for software developers. It's a UNIX like system with a great GUI built on top of it. But how come then that even after I've owned an iMac for a few months, I find myself hardly doing any development work on it?

I try to do my personal development work on the iMac. And recently I even found it quite nice for developing a Java application that's been in my head for a few years now. But most of the development work I do at home is not Java work, it's web development work. And for that I still find myself behind my trusty old Windows XP laptop.

The reason for that is that I do most work through the remote editing feature of WinSCP. For those of you that don't know that program: it provides a Norton Commander style (dual pane) interface, with one pane being the local system and the other a remote system. Like a remote web server. And with a single key press you can open any remote file in a very simple local text editor, make a few changes and then save the file back. Their embedded editor might not be the most feature rich IDE, but it just works, it's there when I need it and apparently it's good enough for me to get the job done with.

But then why doesn't a WinSCP exists for the Mac? I know it's called WinSCP, so it's for Windows. But the Mac must have something similar, right? Well, similar yes... On the Mac there is Fugu, which at first sight seems similar. But it's completely not the same for my case.

Fugu doesn't come with a built-in editor and to me that makes a lot of a difference. They chose to integrate with existing editors instead. Which wouldn't be a problem, if they'd actually integrate with the standard OSX editor: TextEdit. But they don't. Instead they offer a whole list of more or lesser known editors, from BBEdit via TextMate to VI and emacs.

Unfortunately I don't have about 75% of the editors Fugu does integrate with. TextMate sounds great, but I haven't bought it yet as I'll need to invest some time to learn to appreciate it. And for the editors that I do have and that Fugu supports, their integration doesn't work. Now if it doesn't work for those editors, do I want to risk installing yet another editor on my system to find out if the integration works there? Well apparently I don't.

While typing this I already noticed that there are of course more options than just Fugu. There's Cyberduck, apparently Krusader also is nice and Disk Order sounds perfect if it would support SCP/SFTP. So I have some options ahead of me. But until I invest the time and find something that works at least as well as WinSCP, my development work on the Mac is limited to Java applications.

--- January 21, 2008 - Frank van Puffelen ---

I might have finally found my WinSCP replacement. Read more about it here.

Using the iMac for music playback

Now that we've had an iMac in our living room for a few months, we've started using it for many things. One of the most obvious ones is that -after spending almost a month ripping our CD collection- we now use it to play music from. Sure we already had a mediacenter in the living room. But by using the mac, we only have to switch on one device instead of two.

But something that really annoys me is all these small sounds that are added to the music. Just last night we we're listening to the new Crowded House album and right at the end of the song Silent Trees I heard a woosh sound that was not supposed to be there. And at the start of the next song, there was a tring-like sounds that I did not recall hearing before.

So here is one simple request to my family, friends and co-workers: can you please stop signing in and out of iChat while the music is playing?

Help! My mediacenter is dying!

Yesterday I told you about the positive impact our mediacenter has had on the way we watch TV. Unfortunately it hasn't all been positive.

From day one our mediacenter has been having hardware problems.

• Motherboard replacement.
  Within two months of buying the mediacenter, its motherboard had to be replaced. And this is an A brand, mind you. Apparently that doesn't say anything about quality anymore. The service center was pretty close by, though.
  
• Single tuner or twin tuner.
  We went for the mediacenter with two tuners in it. But unfortunately about half of the time, only one of the tuners seems to work. It's annoying, but apparently not annoying enough to send the machine back to the repair shop.
• Hibernate or always awake.
  One the things that is really important is that your mediacenter should "go to sleep" when it's not doing something and then "wake up" when it needs to record a show. And at times that actually worked reliable for us.
  But most of the time, our mediacenter is much like a 15 year old kid: it wakes up when it feels like, stays awake as long as it likes and refuses to go to sleep when you tell it to.
• What's that noise?
  We went for the more expensive VCR form factor mediacenter, because it was supposedly less noisy. And I guess a standard desktop PC would indeed make more noise that our mediacenter. But I still find the amount of noise it makes too much. It could really do with some less power-hungry parts, so at least some of the fans can be removed.
• Wireless keyboard range
  The range that I can use the wireless keyboard at is ridiculous. I basically have to sit on the floor right in front of the mediacenter to get it to work. And even then it is intermittent. I would much rather have a reliable wired keyboard, but apparently am to lazy to get one that looks nice enough in my living room.

Ok, so much for the hardware problems. There also plenty of software problems. Our mediacenter came with Windows XP Mediacenter Edition. That is a whole Windows version dedicated to supporting mediacenter functionality. So it can't be bad, can it? Wel....

• Installation assumes you have a monitor attached
  I bought a mediacenter to hook it up to my TV. Then why does the installation assume that I'm on a high-resolution monitor? Entering that 20 digit license code really is no fun when you can't read half of what's on the screen.
• Windows Mediacenter is an application, not a special version of Windows
  When I saw Window Mediacenter Edition, I expected the whole Windows OS to center around the mediacenter functionality. Well, I was wrong. Mediacenter is nothing more than an application on top of regular Windows. And unfortunately that's how it feels. When I start (or wake up) my mediacenter, I firsts see the PCs POST screen, then I see Windows booting and finally I see the Mediacenter application starting. Imagine your TIVO doing something like that.
  
• PDC? What's that?
  In Europe we have something called program delivery control, which sends some extra signals with the program when they start and end. The result is that you never miss the end of a program that is running late. Admittedly this is available for a limited number of channels, but for those that have it this is a great feature. Unfortunately Windows Mediacenter doesn't support this feature whatsoever.
  
• Teletext support is laughable
  Again in Europe many TV channels carry teletext pages with useful information. Windows Mediacenter can display these fine, but why -on a PC with plenty of memory- do I still have to wait for it to cycle through the pages? Have the developers never heard of caching the pages? More and more TVs do this, but Windows Mediacenter... doesn't.
  
• Why isn't there a web interface to the EPG?
  Programming recordings through the EPG on your TV screen is a real improvement to old-style, time-based VCR programming. But this is one are where a higher resolution screen helps a lot. So why isn't there a standard web-interface to the EPG data on my mediacenter. There's a great third-party program to do this, but why doesn't this work out of the box? Microsoft's own (add-on) solution is worse then the third party one and doesn't even work outside of the US.

• Why isn't the EPG data up to date?
  The quality of the data in the EPG used to be really bad. For some channels we used to miss about 50% of the programs, because the data wasn't in the EPG. This has improved considerably since last year, but it still happens sometimes.
• Failing recordings
  The mediacenter either doesn't start recording a show that it is scheduled to record. Or it records a few minutes, then stops, then starts again, then stops... you get the picture. The result is shows that I really can't watch.
  So I lied yesterday: I have missed quite some episodes of CSI lately. This is the biggest issue for us at the moment. All the other software issues are annoyances, but this one is making me think of unplugging my mediacenter. Or at least of re-installing it completely. I'd happily sacrifice the 40+ hours of recordings that are still on the hard disk to get it to function properly again.
  

I guess a lot of our problems have to do with the fact that we are early adopters. Mediacenter adoption has even now not taken off in full, so we should expect to find some "children's diseases" (that's a Dutch expression) in there. But on the other hand... if I buy something that looks like a VCR, I expect it to work somewhat like a VCR. I wasn't buying a beta version of some new application, at least that's not what it looks like. If something looks like a consumer electronics device, I expect it to work like one.

So that's the current story. As you can see it is really two-sided. On the one hand, having a mediacenter has really changed the way I watch TV. On the other hand our mediacenter has been a pretty constant source of frustration too. Let's just hope Microsoft cleans up its act in a next version of the Mediacenter software (the Vista version only seems to be somewhat better). Or let's hope that Apple adds a receiver to its Apple TV or the Mac Mini. I really hope for the latter, because a few more Macs would add some more technological styling to my living room. :-)

The Mac application menu is at the top of the screen

I noticed that on the Mac when I don't instantly understand how to do something, it often takes me a lot of time to figure out how to do it at all. I think this might be because I don't see the menu bar as part of the application. You see, on a Mac the menu bar of the current application is at the top of the screen. As a long time Windows user, I'm used to it being at the the top of the application window. And apparently it takes me some time to make the transition.

On the one hand the inability to immediately find the application menu is annoying. Why can't those Mac designers just stick to long established standards? On the other hand it is just something 'll have to get used to. But on yet another hand (feeling like a three-handed monster here) it forces the application designers to make sure most common actions are available from the actual client area of the application. And that's a good thing (tm).

iTunes, Garage Band, even a simple application like Photo Booth have the most often used operations somewhere in the main application window. Whether it is the "Import CD" button in iTunes (yup, I'm still busy ripping my CD collection) or something as simple as the small "x" buttons to remove photos from Photo Booth, they are all really close to where the functional "meat" of the application is. And I can already feel that once I get used to finding the right action close by, I might actually hate having to reach out to the application menu so often on other applications.

Our Mac doesn't run Sherlock

One of the good things about Macs, is that women are instantly attracted to them. So those same pheromones that once attracted her to me, last Saturday started flowing between my wife and our new iMac. She approached it slowly at first, carefully absorbing its beauty and the fact that a 20" screen looks pretty huge in our living room. Believe it boys: size does matter!

Within minutes she was happily playing with Safari ("just like Firefox"), iTunes ("hey, where are my songs?"), Photo Booth ("hihi, you look funny") and the simple games that come with OSX. That last one started her on a quest for the favorite game she has on her Windows box: Sherlock - a puzzle game with horrible graphics but very addictive gameplay. The game wasn't installed on the iMac of course, but that didn't stop her from searching and meanwhile exploring the new computer. Her quest to find the game in the end brought her to the Applications menu, where -much to her delight- she found it: Sherlock!

She clicked the icon, starting the Mac search application. Let's just say that she wasn't too excited about the way the OSX programmers had implemented her favorite game!

Macs are heavy

Yesterday I finally gave in and bought my first Mac. I've been ogling them for years, because the machines look gorgeous and the programs I use are mostly available for any platform. The reason I hadn't gotten a Mac so far had simply been the price. They sure are expensive.

But this weekend there was a sale at a local Mac store, so I gave in and spent some of my savings on a brand new 20" iMac. One thing I didn't count on though, was the weight of such a machine. Macs look so clean and bright that I somehow imagined they wouldn't weigh more then a few kilos. Boy was I wrong! The short distance I had to carry the Mac from the store to the car was killing. I had to stop twice just to get my breath back.

Luckily I could park close to home, so I had less trouble there. And the unpacking of such a beautiful device easily made up for the hard work to get it home. I still have no idea what I need it for, but my iMac sure looks great in the living room.