Sunday, September 27, 2009

What has kept us Being Busy in CrossFTP

There has been for a short period of silence on this web site. During this period, we are busy improving our CrossFTP client. Here highlights a few major improvements we are under going:

 Enhanced Amazon S3 Support
  • The S3 head metadata's modification support. You can easily modify and add metadata on one or multiple files stored on S3 site. For example, you can add cache-control header like "max-age" or "expires" with a time value for your S3 files. This will help you to specify the browser cache's living time, and save your cost.


  • Data compression for S3 file transfers. GZip based data compression is now supported by CrossFTP Pro. Just choose Site Manger -> Options -> Data Compression. After that, all files upoads for this site will be automatically compressed. In the log window, you should be able to find the messages like "GZip Compressed". The download process will automatically uncompress the files on the fly. Need to mention that, we also support FTP and SFTP protocol's data compression by toggling this option. That is, if your chosen protocol is FTP, compression will be made by Mode Z on the fly, and if your chosen protocol is SFTP/SSH, the compression will be made by zlib on the fly. To save your bandwidth and cost, you can try this easy and powerful option.
  • Log configurations for the buckets and CloudFront Distribution. Now we have provided those Amazon S3's logging configuration GUI. We think you will like it.
  • Data encryption. Security is an important issue when you put your data on the cloud. This support in CrossFTP Pro is still under working to figure out what is the best way.
  • Various bug fixes. We use the virtual directory simulation to simulate the folder structures for your S3 files. Separator character "/" in your s3 object's key is treated as a folder symbol. Some of your folders may not have such placeholders objects (due to your files are created by some other tools, etc.), we will ask you whether you want to add the placeholder objects to your S3 site. If the answer is yes, we will help to fix the virtual directory problem.
Enhanced SFTP/SSH Command Support
  • Execute your command directly on your SFTP/SSH site. SSH protocol allows you to login and execute command on your remote site. Now CrossFTP Pro directly supports such command execution. It works similar with the FTP's command execution. Check Manage FTP Sites by FTP commands.
  • Remote Archive/Extraction support. If you wants to upload/download a lot of small files, the best way to save your time is to archive them before the transfer and extract them after the transfer. The problem is that the remote site cannot archive/extract your zip files. No, this is not a problem anymore. Now it is supported in CrossFTP Pro for SFTP protocol. You should have a try and save your time for transferring.
More FTP Listing Format Support

Here are the list of format we supported in the previous versions:

  • Unix ls (ProFTPd, Wu-FTPd, Microsoft FTP and many others)
  • DOS (Microsoft FTP and others)
  • VMS and MultiNet (both single and multiline)
We now added the following list format support:

  • OS/2
  • OS/400
  • Netware
  • Connect:Enterprise Unix
  • glFTPd ansi-colored list
  • support for custom list parsers
Misc Enhancements
  • Improved Snow Leopard and Windows 7 support. This few months are busy days for the operating system. We will keep our software good on that.
  • Ident-server protocol support. This is an ancient protocol, but when you need it, you should be able to use it. Now this is added in CrossFTP Pro.
  • Checksum for MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, and CRC32 are supported.
  • And a lot of various bug fixes!
CrossFTP 1.55a is a major update and will be released soon, which includes most of the above enhancement. This is a free update, and is recommended for all CrossFTP Users.