5 Best Drag-N-Drop File Transfer

Friday, August 7, 2009

1. Dropzone ($10)
Aptonic's Leopard-only newcomer Dropzone calls itself the 'Swiss army knife of drag and drop', and it's easy to see why. Drag an item to its Dock icon to view a stack-like grid of user-definable locations. On dropping your item, it can be sent to a local folder, an FTP location, Flickr, Mail, TwitPic, and several other places.


2. Dragster ($19)
Like Dropzone, Dragster is a Dock-based app that enables you to send a dragged item to local and remote locations, or an email client. Rather than pre-configuring items, its workflow is based around remembering previous locations. While Dropzone wins out on Leopard, Dragster is suitable for Tiger uses.


3. Quicksilver (free)
Quicksilver is a long-time Mac favourite enables you to drag an item to it and perform all manner of actions via a unique three-pane interface. The default install enables files to be moved and copied locally, and plug-ins provide further functionality, such as integration with the Transmit FTP client.


4. LaunchBar (€24)
Although initially a launcher, LaunchBar is now a fully-fledged productivity utility. Drop an item on to its Dock icon and you can perform various actions on it via a click of a mouse or a keystroke - and like Quicksilver and Spotlight, sends and copies are sped up due to LaunchBar's incremental search.


5. MoveCM (donationware)
MoveCM takes a more mouse-centric approach, adding 'move', 'copy', 'archive to' and 'alias to' actions to Finder's contextual menu. Sub-menu locations for each action are defined via MoveCM's System Preferences pane.