Frustrated FLOW triallist's dashboard

When Flow first crashed it generated a "send error report" message on OS X Leopard, which I sent (to Apple). I restarted Flow and it froze again, unable (embarrassed?) to list contents of remote directories / sub-directories, as I reported in my original post. It was yesterday's version of Flow, freshly downloaded and installed (I didn't make a note of the number). The connection to the server was via FTP to a password-protected directory.

I have since removed Flow from my Mac, determined not to use it again, since it both erased all the files on my website and failed to resolve errors gracefully. There remains no connection transcript as far as I know, unless Flow or OS X logged it in some other corner of my system. If you can tell me where that may be, I'll send you a copy.

It has taken me half a day to repair the damage done by Flow. Yes, I had an older backup to revert to but, since my purpose in using Flow was to make a fresh backup of site files before performing a security update for the content management system, its failure to cope was ironic.

I notice that other users have reported similar frustrations on this forum. Had I been aware of their concerns I would have been more circumspect in testing Flow.

I gave Flow a try since it was a Staff Pick on the Internet Utilities section of the Apple Downloads site. I was astonished that it behaved more like a beta than a finished piece of software and will communicate my experience to Apple's staff. It may have "a gorgeous yet tasteful user-interface" but eye-candy is not enough. It has to work.

A further result of this experience is that I will probably stop using the Safari browser. Firefox 3 has the FireFTP add-on, which has done all that I hoped Flow might achieve, with no fuss or "discrepancies" with my server. – Frustrated FLOW triallist, on August 27, 2008 09:54