Interarchy is one of the slickest file transfer programs I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Unlike most other file transfer application which use local and remote file viewing panes, Interarchy shows only the remote content, the local content is displayed in the Finder as usual. That’s right, the Interarchy window behaves as any other window on the Mac desktop. This ease of use can be an issue for veterans of classic file transfer applications (like me - something so obvious, isn’t).
While it gets top marks in protocol support, features and interface design, actual file transfers do not live up to the hype. File transfer speeds on this app are good, but not impressive. Nolobe claims that the only limit to this application’s transfer speed is the underlying speed of the hard drive and networking subsystems. I transferred a 700 MB AVI file from my desktop to a local FTP server over gigabit ethernet and it took 3:32s. The same file transferred using CuteFTP Mac Pro took only 2:24s.
Iris is Nolobe’s entry into the graphics market. Looking a bit like Photoshop Elements 3, the software promises to be light and fast with all the tools graphics artists need to get the job done. To bad it doesn’t. Iris looks good, but beyond that it is quite buggy and has several annoying habits. For example: all images are displayed full sized when opened. This is not an issue with most web images, but regularly deal with 10-12 Mpix files that are larger than my 30“ display.
Other functions do not work as advertised and the software has a rather odd tendency to not follow established interface and ”do things it’s own way“. The complete absence of help files does not make things better.
In conclusion, Interarchy has a rather good interface but its performance was not up to claims and Iris needs to be avoided at all costs.
Posts
