Interarchy, old friend
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I received Peter N. Lewis' last "Total Interarchy" issue today. He announces that Interarchy's lead developer Matthew Drayton has formed a new company, Nolobe Pty Ltd, and acquired Interarchy and that he is retiring from its development.
As of February 1, in what amounts to an employee buyout, Interarchy's lead developer Matthew Drayton has formed a new company, Nolobe Pty Ltd, and acquired Interarchy, so this will be the last Total Interarchy newsletter I write. However, rest assured that Interarchy is in good hands, and you can expect to see Interarchy continue to be developed and refined over the years to come.
Total Interarchy Issue 28
An old friend
I must admit it felt like an old friend was about to leave for a far away remote land. Peter's name has always been associated with Interarchy, and Anarchie well before it (before the Mac OS even offered built-in support for TCP/IP networking). It as always been my FTP client of choice. Interarchy 8.5 is much more than just an file transfer client, eventhough I personally don't use it for very much else. I've played around with its mirroring and net disk features but they don't fit with my way of working. I manage large websites with version control, so I prefer to sync my files manually. The network tools I've happened to use are the traffic watching and port scan, but infrequently.
A Finder like UI
What I really appreciate is the large spectrum of protocol support it offers, basically all of them, including Amazon S3, its speed, low resource use, and most of all its user interface. The UI is brilliant. It offers a Finder like approach which can be entirely customised, supporting icon view, list view (awesome - my favourite), or column view, with tabbed browsing. I usually have a small window open in the lower right corner of my screen, with multiple tabs to different directories or servers, and upload my files directly from TextMate's project drawer by dragging them to a folder or a tab in Interarchy's window. Right-click a file in Interarchy and view it or edit it directly in Textmate. Interarchy does all upload/download seamlessly for you when you close or save it.
A feature I would love to see in Interarchy would be bookmark .Mac synchronisation (like Transmit does e.g.).
Interarchy is part of those essential applications that sit in my Dock alongside with Mail, Safari and TextMate (and a bunch of others). There's isn't a working day go by without Interarchy loaded in memory. I recall that Anarchie used to keep a tab on the amount of bytes transferred and assign you an adjective depending on the amount. I've never found it in Interarchy. I'd certainly be on the high end..
John Gruber of Daring Fireball has published an interview of Peter N Lewis and Matthew Drayton which takes you back to the early days and gives you a nice background on the application and its authors. What is to become of Stairways Software? and what new exciting projects does Peter have in store for us? The future will tell.
In the meantime, I'd like to express my gratitude for the innovation, energy and vision Peter and his team put into Interarchy as well as its power. It's made my work that much more easier and enjoyable.
Farewell, and long live Interachy!
Note: v8.5 is a free upgrade to Interarchy 8 owners.