I have been a Mac fan since the start, well actually even before the Mac because I was a Apple ][ user many years ago.    I have been using PC’s for work since the 80’s, and I have switched a few times between Mac and PC for home use.

These days my home use  and professional use is blurred because I work from home in Thailand, I actually have 3 computers and a couple of old ones hidden away too, but I’m using my MacBook Pro 17″ notebook attached to a Acer AL2251W 22″ LCD screen on my desk.   The 22″ Acer is the same resolution as my MacBook’s screen at 1680 x 1050 so things look more or less the same when I switch from attached screen to built in screen.

Anyway, the point is that I’m using my Mac on a daily basis for website stuff, surfing, answering email, keeping lists in excel, and dabbling in forex and some trading stocks.. The Mac does all of this and does it better than any PC I have ever used, except for one application, FTP.

I discovered Cute FTP Pro on the PC a few years ago and it instantly made my life easier due to it’s ability to upload compressed and to recover from a lost connection without having to start a transfer all over again. This is something that many FTP programs do in theory, but in practice Cute FTP professional is the best one for me.

I tried a bunch of FTP apps on the Mac, the best one I found is the free Cyberduck FTP, but it’s not perfect because if the connection is lost half way through uploading a big folder then it just starts again and it can take ages.   I bought Cute FTP for the Mac, and I was very disappointed, it’s next to useless for me.

The answer was to use Cute FTP Pro for Windows and run it on my Mac in what’s called coherence mode using parallels.  That means the application opens just like any other and runs the same as it would on a PC.. only it’s on my Mac desktop. It runs like a dream, and I dont need to visibly run windows, I just click on the Cute FTP icon and the app runs after a delay of about 5 seconds whilst parallels kicks in, in the background.

I’m getting closer every day to being 100% Mac centric.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 4:55 am and is filed under Macintosh, PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.