Rochester, NY -- November 1, 2006 -- Today Ambrosia announced the release of Dragster, a file transfer utility for MacOS X 10.4 or later that takes the drag out of file transfers. Just drag and drop files or folders on Dragster's icon in the Dock, and away they go! Dragster can send files via eMail, upload them to remote servers, copy them to your iDisk, or copy/move files anywhere on your local drives. Download Dragster now, and give it a test drive:

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/dragster/



Despite Dragster's simple and elegant interface, it has an extremely advanced file transfer engine under the hood that optimizes upload speed, especially for repetitive file transfers to the same location. Dragster also features a full-blown file browser for remote servers, allowing you to navigate through file listings using the same intuitive interface regardless of what protocol you're using.

Congratulations on getting this out! Dragster is an amazing program!

I love using it to very easily send files to my iDisk such as my website or just to my Public folder for anyone to access.
I also have an AFP server running on my G5 and my 'Book so I use Dragster to quickly and easily move files between the 2 computers.
Another use of this is there is a server running on my university's campus and I can easily send files to my part on the server.

Basically, Dragster is pretty freaking awesome.

Glad you're enjoying it!

I was really excited to so see this today, and I set up shortcut once I had installed the software. On my system, it seems to take a really long time to transfer over to a remote server. I transferred of six files (only 523.7k total) and it took over a minute. That doesn't include the time to mount the server.

Any idea what might cause this? It's a cool app and one that could replace some of my unwieldy Automator functions.

Thanks!

What protocol are using? Have you tried doing a direct comparison against the Finder for the same amount of data?

As Mike noted, how fast Dragster transfers the files will depend on:

1) Your connection to the server
2) The protocol you use (not all of them are created equal in terms of speed)

We've found that SCP is extremely efficient as a file transfer protocol, but it will depend on your link to the server as well.

AppleShare (AFP) in general is very slow, especially at mounting servers; it's the same if you use the Finder to do it in terms of speed, the protocol was shoehorned to work over IP, and thus is not exactly optimal.

Well I was connecting to our local server over GB connection and through a GB switch using AFP.

The server mounted immediately; it was the file transfer that took so long. I could complete the same operation manually in about 15 seconds, and that includes drilling down through the folders. Again, this was less than 1 MB of file I was moving.

I'd be happy to look into the SCP when I have more time. But the connection time for AFP is just wrong. It doesn't match what I can do under normal, manual operations.

It would be interesting to know if you get the same performance by making a Local Folder shortcut to the same volume. Note that local shortcuts move by default (option key toggles as usual), and you need the volume already mounted for them to work.

I did make a shortcut for a local folder and received a slow operation (though not nearly as slow as the network operation).

The only thing I have not done is restart the computer after installing the software.