My (rather long) list of suggestions

Hi!

I've been using CuteFTP Pro (now 6.0) for ages and because of some of its very annoying bugs/features I'm now looking for a replacement client. So far I've found SmartFTP to be the best choice for this. It's an excellent program though somewhat less powerful than CuteFTP. These are my suggestions for improvement on SmartFTP, some of them come from features already present in CuteFTP:

General UI:
  • Child windows should be more space conserving in general. Thin borders like those of the Local Folder Tab are a good example to follow. The present thick header and borders take up a lot of precious space. My desktop is currently at 1024*768 and I see why I should raise it. The Transfers bar contains a lot of empty space too. There's the option to maximize child windows to make the borders disappear but I'd like to see at least 2 browser windows side-by-side with minimal borders so maximizing is not the real thing.
  • Auto-Arrange setting is usually forgotten when all connection windows are closed. Since I often use use 2 windows side-by-side (vertically arranged) this gets annoying to re-set each time.
  • Some more keyboard shortcuts would be appreciated, for example for: stopping/pausing selected task(s) in the q, downloading selected remote file(s) to the default or currently selected local dir, arrange windows vertically, etc. In general, one should be able to browse and initiate/control transfers using the keyboard only. You bet I love FAR-like managers.
  • Perhaps an option to remember last-used folders as default download target would come handy. This should be a per-site setting.
    • Quick Connect:
      • Names of favourites should be recognised instead of trying to connect to ftp://favname site. See Internet Explorer for an example.
      • Connect button on the quick connect bar. Even if I use the keyboard shortcut I feel that this button should be present.
      • If user and password fields are empty, anonymous login should be assumed. I don't like that check button, it slows things down.
        • Tray Icon:
          • Left-click on tray icon should trigger default action (which is restore) instead of behaving like a right-click and bringing up the pop-up window.
          • You could have the pop-up hint window (that appears when the pointer hovers over the tray icon) to display useful information. Like transfer speeds, # of remaining/finished queue items, ETA to queue finish, etc. Ideally this could be configurable.
            • Queue and transfer control and UI:
              • Allow control of individual / selected queue items. Stop/start(retry)/pause are the functions I'd like to see.
              • There should be one view on the tranfer bar that'd allow a quick assessment of the status of the transfers. I use the Global Queue for this purpose but it's missing some features. Optionally the finished tasks should remain in the list and instead of/in addition to the Status coloumn there should be a progress bar with the completed percentage displayed in the center. A progress bar is much quicker to check out than information in text. As examples for a suitable progress bar I'd take eMule or the standard Windows installation progress bars. Also I'd like to mention CuteFTP's Transfer Engine which does a good job at displaying the status of the transfers but unfortunately allows only basic control of the queue. The Connections tab is not able to do this job, since it doesn't display all queue items and queue control isn't possible from there.
              • Copy/cut/paste for files in browser windows. This could be used to initiate transfer (local-remote, remote-remote, on-site or whatever). CuteFTP does this.
              • Total estimated remaining time for all transfers or just the global queue.
              • Perhaps session queues should disappear totally. At least session queues allowed for good control of the usage of the browser connection.
                • System or Core or whatever:
                  • HTTP,HTTPS,SFTP modes of transfer should be implemented. I'm aware that SFTP was requested in other posts, I read the sticky one, but I felt it was worth mentioning.
                  • Multi-part (multi-threaded) download of larger files is a nice feature I'm missing.
                  • Recursive chmod for folders.
                  • Advanced rules for file exists situations. Rules like in CuteFTP or a 3x3 matrix mentioned in previous posts are equally good in my opinion.
                  • Possibly some way to verify uploads. Or compare files/directories on two connections, downloading both if necessary and comparing locally.
                  • Priority filters should apply to ALL files to be transfered, that means regardless of whether they're located in a sub-folder or not, they should be done with first.
                    • Here comes a list of the features I miss the most, so even if you skipped the previous part perchance you will notice these hopefully.

                      List of the most important ones:
                      [list]
                    • multi-part download
                    • SFTP,(HTTP,HTTPS)
                    • individual control of q items
                      the easier ones:
                    • progress bar, finished tasks remain on the q
                    • left-click on tray icon restores main window
                      [list]

                      As a final note I'd like to suggest that whatever you do with the queues you shouldn't make the mistake that makes CuteFTP Pro very annoying. There the allowed number of connections are all used automatically for transfering queue items even at the cost of making browser windows unresponsive or making a new browser connection impossible. For example if you put numerous files in the transfer queue, all available connections would be used for the transfers, even the browser one. After closing the browser window you can only open up a new one if you change your global/per-site number of max connections. But hey, even if the browser window opens, its connection will be used for the next queue item thus making it unresponsive.
                      I think user actions should take priority over other transfers even if that means that an active transfer should be stopped or the number of allowed connections be temporarily increased. Now, I know SmartFTP does this the right way, I just wanted to lower the possibility of such a thing ever happening.

                      Sorry for the epic proportions of my post and thanks in advance if any of these suggestions become reality.

Let's see, what else I could be wishing for :?:

Ah, 1 thing comes to mind:

Transfers toolbar, Global Queue tab: the Status column for stopped/aborted transfers should show the last known status of the transfer instead of being empty. It's important to know how much of it is left/done even if a task is stopped.

Hi again!

Some additional items to my list:

My complaints about the lack of a quick way to arrange windows 'vertically' were unjustified, it can be done in 2-3 clicks. It's fast enough as it is (with auto arrenge on that is). Would be more convenient though, if the Local Browser and Local Folders windows would merge, keeping the versatility of the former and the one-click reachability and thin borders and fixed position of the latter. As I said before, all windows should have thinner borders and be more space conserving in general.

Managing the order of the Global Queue is very tedious. When trying to reposition several files in the queue one has to (1) select them, then (2) right-click/move/direction that means 2 sub-menu navigation, and repeat ponts 1 and 2 over again for each position change. What I don't like is that the selection is lost after each change and there aren'nt any quick buttons to move the selected items.

I previously wrote that a connect button on the quick connect bar would be appriopriate, however now I see that there's no quick connect toolbar at all, but it's divided into a address and a login toolbar. I think that these two toolbars and the 3 connection control buttons (connect, reconnect, disconnect) should belong together on one common toolbar.

I found the existence of the queue source tab superfluous. I put each task directly into the global queue.