A while back, I finally got fed up enough with my choices for "real" ftp clients (that is, a dedicated GUI-fied ftp client) on Mac OS 9 that I finally shelled out for Panic's Transmit. It's not cheap, at least not as cheap as I'd expect an ftp client to be. I even asked if they'd accept less than the $25 they were asking, and got back a relatively haughty email (imo) saying how many universities, etc and other clients had felt that the price was justified. (Fwiw, they seem like pretty good guys; I don't think they intended that email to come across haughty.)

Anyhow, I eventually shelled out my $25. Transmit is a very nice app, and as I upgraded to OS X, though the cmd-line ftp client is right easy to get to, I still missed Transmit. Panic was working on Carbonizing 1.7 (the version I'd gotten -- Carbonizing is, oversimplified, a way of using the same codebase you'd been using in Mac Classic and use it in OS X with minimal tweaking), and I was hopeful.

Well, after a while trying to create a Carbonized version, which they released for free to beta test, they essentially gave up and "rewrote [Transmit] from scratch in Cocoa for Mac OS X". And for me to get a copy, I've got to shell out another $17 (so about $7-8 off for having registered the first version).

That doesn't make me particularly happy. When I registered 1.7, iirc (and granted that's an important if, but it is the impression I've got), I was told I'd get free upgrades for the rest of time. I didn't ask Panic to rewrite Transmit for what they see as a new OS. For the consumer (here, of course, me) the move to OS X is not a hurdle that I see. I want my ftp client on my Macintosh.

I'm not quite going to call shenanagans b/c OS X is a new OS, and as a bit of a programmer, I can see that being a problem. But imagine if there was no OS X yet and we were still on OS 9.9.999.9 and somebody rewrote their app from scratch to use what they felt was a better technology. And then say they charged you for this upgrade after telling you you'd get all upgrades for free if you "register today". That's hardly fair, is it? Back to our our Transmit example: For the "uneducated", OS 9 and OS X are the same thing -- one is just a newer version of the other.

Why should I pay again to compensate for your decision to rewrite your application in another langauge?

Anyhow, not something that's going to get me too upset, but I did think that this is something software programmers, including myself, need to remember about clients. If they don't see something as a hurdle, it's going to be hard to justify the cost. Transmit is just the example that hits closest to home. And so far, I've been content to use ftp on the cmd-line in OS X.