I’m incredibly(!) proud to announce the immediate availability of Flow, Extendmac’s new FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and .Mac client exclusively designed for Mac OS X Leopard. After a 15-day fully featured trial, you can purchase Flow for just $29.

What makes Flow different from any other FTP client on OS X?

I’m glad you asked! Flow is different because of how it feels to use. It’s hard to quantify, but immediately obvious when you begin using it. Despite being an incredibly powerful application, Flow is always light on its feet. It’s fast, it’s gorgeous, and it makes sense.

But there’s more to Flow than being delightful to use. Flow is also very smart: Flow can QuickLook just about any file on your server, can automatically copy the URL to the file you just uploaded to your clipboard, and can edit your files too, complete with tabs, syntax coloring, code sense, and live-previewing.

Words only mean so much, though. Download Flow, and fall in love with the FTP client that makes you smile.

What about support? What about the future?

Included with each license is unlimited support to help you out when you need it. Even our beta testers have been surprised at how quickly and accurately we respond — I’m sure you will be too.

As for Flow’s future, you can bet on it being big. As I’ve mentioned previously, Flow 1.0 is truly just the beginning, and I can’t wait to get started on the exciting ideas that are in place to be implemented in future Flow 1.x releases.

Thank You

To those of you who’ve been watching since the beginning: thank you. The endurance of your enthusiasm and support is what keeps me going every single day. I couldn’t have done it without you!

To Flow’s Beta Testers: thank you. You guys, all 1700 of you, have been awesome. You’ve been invaluable. You’ve been perfect. I couldn’t have asked for a better group. Together, you helped shape the development of a hand-crafted piece of software I care about an awful lot. Your participation, activism, and enthusiasm have made it clear that Flow means an awful lot to you, too.

To my family, friends, and everyone in a 10 mile radius to my house and/or TwitterFeed: thank you. I can only imagine what it has been like to put up with me these past few months. Needless to say, it hasn’t been easy, but I appreciate it. I couldn’t have done it without you, either.

Flow’s development has been a long, long journey, but I couldn’t have asked for a better beginning to an exhilarating adventure.

Passionately, Excited, And Truly Yours,
Brian Amerige.

(P.S. - Thoughts? Comments? It’d make my day if you’d let me know by posting a comment!)

It is with euphoric excitement that I announce that Flow will be launching next Friday, April 4th, 2008!

Tell your friends, family, and colleagues — the first Leopard-Only FTP client will be made available on Friday afternoon, for both download and purchase.

Good times ahead!,
Brian Amerige.

Flow is one of the “lucky” applications that gets to make a decision that many other applications don’t get to make. Because Flow was in development before Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) was released publicly, the issue of whether or not Flow would be 10.5-only has always been somewhat up-in-the-air.

Once the decision is made, it will be final for the remainder of that major version. That is, if 1.0 includes support for Tiger, *ALL* 1.x releases will support Tiger. I think it’d be unethical to drop support for an operating system as a minor release.

—

That being said, after opening up and seeing the incredible support from the community earlier this month, I think it’s super important that I get your opinion about this issue.

To help you best answer the question, I’ve outlined the benefits and deficits of being 10.5 only. I’ll give you fair warning though: while I tried to be as objective as possible, being 10.5 only makes me my job easier (and allows me to make a better product). I’m definitely bias.

Benefits of being a Leopard-only Application

• Flow will be able to take advantage (moreso post-1.0) of the latest Leopard technologies. This means less time spent on getting technicalities right, and more time spent on implementing really cool features.
• With 10.4 out of the picture, I can stop writing “dual code” in certain situations, which saves time and increases the rate of development.
• Better performance because Flow could take advantage of the latest APIs.
• An increase in support and issue resolution efficiency. Supporting two operating systems is understandably more difficult than supporting one. Dropping 10.4 support means I no longer need to fix 10.4 only bugs. Fair warning: As of now, there is only one outstanding 10.4-only bug. In the future, though, this may not be the case.

Deficits of being a Leopard-only Application

• If you’re a 10.4 user, you can’t use Flow. According to the latest statistics available, about 20% of the Mac user base is running on 10.5 right now. More interestingly, 83.1% of the current beta testers are running on 10.5 right now. This tells me that there is a high correlation between people who are interested in third party software and those who are interested in first party (Apple) software.
• If you’re a primary 10.5 user, but still have an old mac running 10.4, you can’t use Flow on your old mac. The practicality and applicability of this “deficit” is questionable at best. Honestly, I just thought it’d look unfair if I only listed one deficit

So, what do you think? Would you mind if Flow was 10.5-only? Why, or why not?

[Update: I posted my thoughts and conclusive action to the discussion as a comment. The short version: Yes, Flow will be Leopard-only!]