Binarynights
Elevating Your File Management Experience
We are thrilled to announce the release of ForkLift 4, the next evolution of your favorite file manager and file transfer app. After years of hard work and dedication, utilizing the latest technology, we’ve completely rewritten ForkLift to bring you a more responsive, visually stunning, and feature-packed experience. Get ready to explore a new world of efficiency, speed, and style with ForkLift 4!
What’s New in ForkLift 4?
Blazing Speed
ForkLift 4 is faster than ever before. We have optimized every aspect of the app to ensure lightning-fast performance. Whether you’re browsing files, transferring data, or managing your storage, you’ll notice a significant improvement in speed. You will experience the biggest change in performance when you’re synchronizing files.
Modern and Elegant Design with Customization Options
We believe that a great user experience begins with a beautiful interface. ForkLift 4 sports a sleek, modern design that not only looks fantastic but also enhances usability. Navigating through your files has never been more visually appealing. But that’s not all—ForkLift 4 also comes with a range of predefined themes, giving you the opportunity to tailor the app’s appearance to your preferences. Plus, creative users can even craft their own custom themes, making ForkLift 4 truly yours in every way.
Enhanced Protocol Compatibility for a Modern File Sharing Landscape
In the dynamic world of file sharing, adaptability is crucial. Recognizing the evolving importance of cloud service providers, we’ve broadened ForkLift 4’s protocol support to make connecting to various devices and networks easier than ever before. Whether you’re working with traditional protocols like FTP and SFTP or embracing the latest trends, ForkLift 4 has you covered.
Our Newly Added Protocols: Dropbox, Google Drive Team Drives, and Microsoft OneDrive
We understand that cloud service providers like Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive have become pivotal in today’s file sharing ecosystem. In response to this changing landscape, we’ve integrated support for these platforms. This ensures that you can seamlessly manage and transfer files not only using the latest cloud services but also with the familiar and popular options you’ve come to rely on.
Bug Fixes and User Wishes Granted
We’ve been listening to your feedback and addressing your concerns. In ForkLift 4, we’ve squashed numerous bugs and implemented user-requested features. Your experience is our priority, and we’re committed to making ForkLift the best file manager for you.
Just a few highly requested features added to ForkLift 4:
- Option to save view options for specific folders
- Synchronization of favorites through iCloud
- Option to color the icons in the sidebar
- Connecting to Amazon S3 buckets with bucket level only permissions and using two factor authentication
- Search within content with Spotlight
- Direct connections to cloud service providers including Google Team Drives
- Option to use automatic name column width
- The tools now have the capabilities of a native shell, enabling remote editing as well
Introducing Our New Business Model
With ForkLift 4, we’re introducing lifetime licenses to a wider user base. The ForkLift lifetime licenses come with a defined period of free updates, allowing you to enjoy the latest features, improvements, and security enhancements.
Here’s how it works: After your specified free update period, you can continue using the last version of ForkLift covered by your license indefinitely—it’s yours to keep and use. If you’re eager to stay at the forefront of innovation and take advantage of the freshest updates, simply purchase a new license.
We believe this new business model strikes the perfect balance between providing value to our loyal users and ensuring the sustainability of ForkLift’s development. At the same time, you have the freedom to choose when and how you want to access the latest and greatest ForkLift has to offer.
How to Get ForkLift 4
Visit our Store to explore ForkLift licensing options, including single-user, family, and small business licenses. Each license type offers a choice of 1 or 2 years of free updates.
To celebrate this release, for a limited time only, we are offering an incredible deal: with each new license, enjoy an additional 100 days of free updates.
Read the ForkLift 4 Quick Start Guide to become familiar with essential information about the app.
We have been on a mission to make ForkLift 4 the number one force in file management. It is clean, fast and robust. – Download ForkLift 4 now!
No big new features, removed good features that will not come back in FL4, no upgrade pricing (unbelievable), not satisfying new license model (subscription medium-light) and no real changelog with all new changes / features in the big major update version in an overview – as standard at most of all software apps (Maybe because there are not so many big news!?!) … Your new version seems only try to make an optical „big thing“ (I personally am not really convinced about the new GUI) … Now, after some years with FL3, I will move and try a new „real“ professional file manager. What a pitty.
Full agreement! This is also how you can drive a company against the wall. Bye, Binary Nights.
To reiterate what others have said, I’m not a fan of this change at all.
It seems like you want to have your cake and eat it too.
While many apps have migrated to a subscription model, most did so because they just had a single version (e.g. CoolApp), sold a bunch of it with lifetime updates, saw their potential new client base dry up, and decided to change their model to try and get more money from those existing clients.
But that isn’t really the case here, is it? ForkLift has had multiple versions over the years, and had a paid upgrade approach. People who paid for V2 had to pay more for V3. But they would only do so if they felt it was warranted based on new features — meaning you had an incentive to be innovative and provide some justification to upgrade. So it was a fair trade off — if you wanted the new shiny, pay more. If you were happy as-is, don’t.
While the first example was, let’s be fair and honest, unsustainable, the second example, your prior model, was completely fair and viable for the long term. That’s how most software companies have survived for decades. Assuming they were good and produced, and continued to produce, good products.
But now, you want to move away from that and make everyone pay more, even if there is no promise or guarantee of anything worth the cost.
If V4 would have been good enough to stand on its own, people would have paid to upgrade. But it seems like it only has some minimal improvements to V3, and maybe you realized it wasn’t actually “worth” upgrading to for most people, so decided to go with this approach instead to maximize profits at our expense.
While your ‘better late than never’ thank you to existing customers is at least something, it’s pretty sad that it was only an after thought after enough pushback. But what concerns me is this: do those extra 100 days even worth anything at all? You’ve gone almost 365 days without a single update to V3. So what does +100 or +200 “free” days mean if that same trend continues. Or, even worse, you just drag out updates over a longer period of time to make it seem like you are doing them more frequently.
And there lies the problem. With your new business model, you’ve also changed the way you are incentivized for development. What I mean by this is that you are now rewarded by taking what could have been just one larger update and spreading it out over 3-6 months so it seems like you’re doing more work. Which means we have to wait longer for bug fixes. And any new features will likely be spaced out every 12+ months so you can try to get people to stay subscribed. Either way, the customer base gets screwed.
So no, I am not a fan. Just like I’m not a fan of any other company that has gone down this rabbit hole. I’m sure your reply, if I get one, will be about how we can unsubscribe and keep the version we had. But how long before you change your mind on that one too?
I guess it is time to start looking for alternatives.
Sad but true.
Where are the FL4-Features? Compared with the FL3 the benefits are very scarce.
I’m a long time user of FL3 but I guess I need to look for alternatives…the 100/200 days extra doesn’t change the worth-question.
It is a pity that ForkLift 4 went the same path as other apps in regard to reduced usability. It looks pretty, new features are welcome but core features used 90% of time became worse. Look at the information density in old vs new version. The contrast of alternating background is also worse. (Screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/YWDEHJT ) Old version had great balance of prettiness and usefulness. The new version is regression in my opinion. And also the translation is gone now.
What do you mean by information density? We will add all languages that were available in ForkLift 3.
Please look at the image I linked that shows comparison between ForkLift 3 and 4. At the regular window size, there is about 15% less rows of files visible (font 12 in both). The new top bar and tabs look pretty but are less useful. And about the translation… Please also look at the linked screenshot – Polish translation didn’t work for me. I really wanted to purchase the upgrade (as I bought last 2 versions) but I decided that it doesn’t make sense as I prefer to use ForkLift 3 as long as it works correctly. And it is pretty much bug-free at this point. It is sad that you didn’t check the screenshot with evidence that I created.
Sorry, but I didn’t see the link in your previous comment before. It was a design choice to make ForkLift 4 less dense looking. It’s on our feature request list to make it more compact. We will consider that if a lot of users would like to see the old line height in FL4.
The Polish localization will be added later.
If you are satisfied with ForkLift 3, then keep using it. We hope that further developments in ForkLift 4 will convince you to switch later.
I agree with your take that the new UI being a downgrade compared to the previous version. – What’s the use of the giant icons next to the paths? Where’s the option to disable it?
– Where’s the option to have the info about available disk space and number of selected objects at the bottom?
– Why make the tabs giant buttons that (in dark mode) don’t fit the rest of the theme?
Usability also suffered:
– Why does the app crash (!!!) when dragging and dropping tabs to the other side?
– Why does the app reopen without restoring the last viewed tabs after a crash?
All in all this update is very disappointing and grounds for a refund (haven’t even touched on the ridiculous licence model). I switched from Path Finder to Forklift a while ago and I’m seriously beginning to regret the decision.
The status bar from the bottom is now on the top below the path, so that space is twice as high as before, allowing us to put a big icon next to them. We think that the icons look good. The tabs look differently, because we wanted a fresh look, and we thought that they look nice.
We tried to fix the crash that can happen when the tabs get relocated, but it seems that there are still issues with that. We will try to fix that if we can find out what is causing the crash exactly. The app reopens without restoring the last state because ForkLift saves that info when you quit it, but when the app crashes, it can’t save that info because it wasn’t quit normally. This works the same way with ForkLift 3 as well.
To my knowledge, Path Finder is subscription based and in addition, they offer a 1 year license, which is the same as our model. I don’t know how our model is ridiculous compared to that.
During beta testing, we fixed all known crashes. Dragging the tabs was one of them, which as it seems, wasn’t fixed entirely. Another issue that causes crashes right now, is the editing of the light and dark themes in column view. This has never been an issue during beta testing, and we have already fixed it, the fix will go live in the next update. Other than these two issues, there are no issues that would cause frequent crashes.
Hi, sadly I’ll not continue with Forklift, as many I don’t like the subscription model, and especially at this price, I prefer buy a lifetime version knowing, that a new version will popup years after.
I’m sorry to hear that. ForkLift doesn’t have a subscription model. Apps with subscriptions don’t work after the subscription expires but you will be able to use ForkLift 4 as long as you want even when you are not eligible to install new updates. Of course, you are free to decide if you want to buy a license or not.
I was so looking forward to the final version…
After test driving it I find that Forklift is still unable to display multiple color tags on a file (Finder can do it) and so far I haven’t found a way to disable individual files or folders in a folder sync. “Automatically Resize” or any other setting in the Preview pane can not be made a default setting. And these are just three nuisances I found within 10 minutes.
Is Forklift 4 really out of the beta state?
I’m sorry for those issues, but they are missing features and not bugs. Deselecting items in the sync window was available in ForkLift 3, so hopefully, that will be available in ForkLift 4 as well. The file viewer in the Preview Pane is an external file viewer. We will check if the user defined settings can be saved and if they can, then we will allow that.
Since the announcement of Forklift 4 and the annual license system, I hesitated for a long time while looking for another software that could replace Forklift that I have been using for years.
Well, thank you, I just discovered QSpace Pro and purchased my perpetual license.
All the best !
We are sorry that you felt the need to switch, good luck with the new app.
The system is in Simplified Chinese, but the software is in English. How can I change it?
ForkLift 4 doesn’t have Chinese localization yet. but we will add it.
Upgraded to v4. Everything is great apart from the fact that my “Tools” where I had about 6-7 command line hacks saved did not survive the upgrade 🙁 I have to restore those manually.
You have to “restore” those because tools work differently in ForkLift 4. Instead of copy pasting them, you can make them much simpler. For example:
Instead of “/usr/bin/open -a /System/Applications/Preview.app $SOURCE_SELECTION_PATHS”
You can use: “open /System/Applications/Preview.app $SOURCE_SELECTION_PATHS”
The whole tools section is much smarter, the tools now have the capabilities of a native shell, enabling remote editing as well. Try to experience with it a little bit and you will see how much more you can do with tools in ForkLift 4.
I’ve been a long time user of Forklift (10+ yrs) and so when I saw the email for a new version I immediately jumped on it. I was very disappointed to the see the new business model with no consideration (or discount) to long time users, however I went ahead and purchased it anyway. After using it for a few days now, I must say that I’m really disappointed. Barely anything in the way of useful new features, the limited “themes” are incredibly poor when it comes to screen readability and the overall UI (although a little prettier), is worse that v3.
As far as stability goes, it’s crashed about 40+ times so far. If you try to edit the “Light Theme” by clicking the + icon to duplicate it, it either crashes instantly, or the majority of the screen goes transparent and unreadable and then crashes when you try to adjust the colours. The theme editing is also incredibly limiting in regards to what you can actually change. If you opt for the dark theme, you can barely see the cursor due to its colour when trying to change the filename.
You also can’t change the background of the top header where the icons and path bar sit, which means it doesn’t stand out from the main files columns making things more difficult to read, plus the actual path with the number of items/disk space being so close together makes things cluttered. The number of items/disk space was right at the bottom of the window in v3, which made it much easier to read and less cluttered.
Clicking on the individual items in the Path also doesn’t work half the time. If you have a folder selected and then try to selected the folder above it, within the Path Bar, sometimes it selects the folder and other times it does absolutely nothing, making it less that useful for navigating long paths structures.
When I purchased v4 I opted for the 2 yr plan only because I know how slow it is to get updates for Forklift. I honestly can’t remember the last time v3 was updated, it was that long ago! I see now that you’ve also offered an extra 100 days for the license due to the backlash of your new pricing model and no upgrade discounts. When it comes to the time between updates for Forklift, an extra 3 months is still a pretty poor offering.
The iCloud Synchronization of favorites is probably one of the most useless features. The favourites I have on one computer are completely different to the ones I use on another. It would be much more useful if you could synchronise all your settings/themes so that all your machines could be configured in the same way.
Overall, I’d say that v4 is a bit of a downgrade compared to v3. I do love using this app though so I really hope that you can improve the UI, make theme adjustments A LOT more flexible in terms of what we can change, fix all the crashes when trying to tweak the themes, and improve the overall stability.
What happened to the touchbar? No icons in v4, I cannot find a setting for it either. Is it gone for good? If so, I will stay with v3 🙁
I’m sorry but ForkLift 4 doesn’t have support for the touch bar.
Darn, I liked the touchbar! I will reconsider purchasing after the trial.
You want to know why people find the new pricing model repugnant?
This is why:
—
ForkLift 4.0 (September 5, 2022)
New
Everything is new
ForkLift 3.5.8 (September 20, 2022)
—
From your change log. 350 days without a single update, bug fix, new feature, improvement, etc. And you can’t even come up with an actual list of new features in V4 that can justify the cost after a year of supposed development.
Giving us +100 days of “free” updates is meaningless. You owe us for the 350 days that you didn’t give us anything all year long. All existing V3 users should be given a free 1 year upgrade to V4 to make up for that.
There were no updates to ForkLift 3 in the last year because we were working on ForkLift 4. There were 5 years of updates prior to that period. Part of the reason why we are switching to a new business model is that we want to add new things to ForkLift continuously and not just when a new major version comes out. We hope that future updates to ForkLift 4 will prove that.
Joining the choir of unimpressed commenters, it’s depressing. I also reflect on the use of the term “Lifetime licence” under the header “Introducing Our New Business Model” above
A software licence commonly has a defined period of free updates, usually a year. if you don’t renew the licence you may continue using the software but are not eligible to any updates. This is exactly what the so called “new business model seem to be all about” – the only new is the added word “Lifetime”.
This smells like a scam. A lifetime licence is usually pricey but gives free access to all future updates – not so in this case. Maybe this update is a sign times up for ForkLift.
I’m sorry that you feel depressed. Maybe, the term “lifetime license” can be used differently as well, but it is clearly expressed on our site what is meant by that: a lifetime license with a set period of free updates. It is lifetime, because after the defined period expires, you don’t loose access to the app and can keep using it for as long as you want. Nobody is claiming that you get free updates for the rest of your life.
Thanks for answering. We are obviously not on the same page here. There are a lot of apps, plugins etc that offers lifetime plans (subscriptions) with uninterrupted updates with no end date and no further payments. What you offer in your “new business model” is a normal subscription. Period. It seems to me your new business model is confusing even for yourself, why would you otherwise need to declare the meaning of it? To me the word lifetime stuck on to a normal subscription gives the product a shine of added value that’s just not there. And no, the term lifetime license cannot be used differently as you suggest. when the meaning of words are tweaked like this it’s usually called false advertising. Just like Bartek (comment below) and many others I feel cheated.
Thanks to Tatos (comment above) I am now trying out QSpace Pro.
I have been a user of your application since May 2008, so for over 15 years, which is quite a long time. I just checked this specifically.
Order Number: ST82297535
Order Date: 5/29/2008
Order Method: Web Store
Grand Total: $29.95
I bought all versions one by one as updates. When I found out that we no longer knew each other and that as a new user I had to buy the application, I felt cheated. That bonus of 100, 200 or any number of additional days of free updates is worthless without a schedule and guarantee of new features. The absurd thing is that I now have to pay for bug fixes that occur after this period. You treated the people who provided you with funding for this project terribly. However, I bought it and was disappointed again. Did I just buy the Beta version? which does not have a Polish localization and suffers frequent failures. Additionally, the user interface looks worse than before, and the settings have not been imported from the previous version. Do I really need to reconfigure all my shortcuts, views and other settings? What will you do with everything I wrote? Customer trust takes years to gain, but can be lost very quickly.
Don’t like the new business model at all either, to me it’s a subscription not a lifetime subscription. And I agree with others that we haven’t had an any updates in Forklift 3 for a year, it seems like we already paid for version 4 but are asked to pay again.
Thank you all for your feedback. Thanks to you, I just saved at least $19.95. I first purchased a FL3 license a year and a half ago. Very cool app. But after reading the reviews of users who switched to FL4, I concluded that I would not do it myself
Why not simply announce the shift to a subscription-based business model? Presenting it as a ‘lifetime license’ just lead to confusion among users who may later realize it’s actually a subscription model. IMO granting long-time users a free one-year update period could allow them to experience and evaluate the new business model. This might encourage them to consider renewing their subscription the following year, especially if you plan to roll out more frequent updates you didn’t do previously. Alternatively, providing a discounted upgrade option could also be a viable solution
This is not a subscription, because you can keep using ForkLift even after your license “expires”. You can’t open apps after your subscription expires.
We are not giving ForkLift for free to people just to convince them to buy it a year from now. Users who want to test ForkLift 4, can use it in trial mode.
“ForkLift 4 didn’t import my multi-rename and sync favorites. How can I fix that?
Multi-rename and sync favorites can’t be imported from ForkLift 3 because those features work differently in the two versions.”
I’ve got a lot of very complex Rename items.
Are you kidding when you say it’s not importable?
Is that respect for your customers? Saying you haven’t developed any tools to convert the whole Favorites is really unprofessional, a disgrace.
I’ll use FL until it no longer works with macOS, but you’ve definitely lost yet another customer.
We understand your frustration and we are sorry for that. The two engines behind the rename feature are totally different in the two versions. In a perfect world, we would have written that converter but because we are a small company and don’t have unlimited resources, we had to make some sacrifices, including not writing the multi-rename favorites converter/importer.
The filters inside the Sync feature work differently than in ForkLift 3, so in that case, importing the favorites would have been dangerous, because it is very hard or in some cases impossible to recreate the same filters. It is safer if the user adds them again to make sure that the filters do what the user wants them to do.
FL3 read my ‘~/.ssh/config’ file containing ‘IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ids/%h/%r/id_ed25519’ meaning I never had to explicitly configure each SSH connection with its individual private key. This was always a big selling point over other SFTP clients; FileZilla, Transmit etc.
However, this appears not to be the case with FL4. Is there any possibility this functionality will be re-instated?
Long-time FL user here. I purchased the newest version of FL4. I hope that updates and bug fixes will happen on a more regular basis. A few of my concerns with the newest version are:
1) There is no global “View Options” settings. I would like all of my FL window panes to be at 19pt font size, with more line-spacing between items, in list view.
2) Synching Favorites and Workspaces works, but what’s perplexing is that I am unable to reach a Favorite or Workspace if it’s not directly attached to my Mac. Local network storage should automatically mount if it’s not directly connected to the Mac running FL.
Upgrade pricing should have been offered from the start for users of previous versions. I don’t mind paying and keeping the version of software I own (I hate subscription software). I would like to see regular updates to know that my investment in this tool has value.
Thank you for upgrading.
1. There was no global View Option setting in ForkLift 3 either. Changing the settings works the same way as in ForkLift 3. You should change the settings in all tabs or save the setting as the Default one and then restore it from the View menu in all open tabs. newly opened tabs copy the view settings of the active tab.
2. I’m sorry but I don’t understand what you mean by this.
So I get that it’s early and I haven’t had my coffee yet, but I can’t even DRAG AND DROP FILES (all I can do with mouse is highlight) since upgrading to FL4 … this is even after a restart. Is there some arcane preference I need to enable? I paid for the upgrade on faith cuz I like FL3 so much but this shakes me …
OK, let me amend that — I can d&D in list view but not column view. Someone please tell me this is not on purpose
We are not aware of such an issue. Please send us a screen recording about this at support [at] binarynights [dot] com
I have used several version of forklift and it used to be the main think I always bought the new version for. I have to say after trying the demo I was not impressed.
Then the price and new way of charging is just daft. What happened to the old way of things you by version X and you got free upgrades until the next major version. Then the companies had to work for you to buy the upgrade as they added features so made it worthwhile to update. How backward is it that you remove features, remove languages and say its a released product and going to cost you.
I have had several crashes on the version 4 and like others have said the release cycle on forklift has never been quick so I would have no faith that they will fix the bugs before my 1 year of updates runs out.
Thank you for your feedback. We will write a blog post explaining why we have switched to this business plan. I can’t answer to each user individually raising the same questions. Please send us the crash reports if there are crashes. We will soon release an update that will fix some of the crashes. We don’t receive a lot of crash reports, a big portion of the crashes happens when you connect to an sftp server. We have already fixed that issue and the fix will be available in the next update. Keep an eye open for future releases to see what has been added to FL4.
The line “each user individually raising the same questions” is a proof of the fact that so many of your customers are unhappy about the new price strategy you guys have employed. Doesn’t it ring a bell to you?
Unfortunately FL4 is not able to open *.eml (saved Emails) via QuickView (SpaceBar when file is selected). Hopefully this will be fixed soon. The QuickLook function is very crucial to me…
ForkLift 4 is able to display .eml files, please try to enable full disc access in the system settings, I think that you can’t preview the emails because you haven’t enabled that setting.
No, this doesn’t work. I granted the full disk access…
I see the email mail in the preview pane…with al the mail server stuff…FL4 did not really parsed the email content out (attachments are displayed as a long series of urecognizable text). Quick look opens a window with a spinning loading wheel.
Please contact us in an email regarding this.
This whole ForkLift 4 release is just a mess and laughably bad in so many ways. FL4 is a downgrade from FL3 in almost every possible way. More was removed from FL4 than added. The only real change is a new (questionable) UI. When asking for an actual change log or a larger list of changes, they say “There are so many changes that creating such a list is quite overwhelming.” That’s a straight cop out, as they know that there aren’t as many improvements/changes as they act like there are. I’ve compiled a list of issues and downgrades in FL4, as well as the excuses that the devs replied with when these issues were brought up.
Let me start by quoting BinaryNights statement with the release of FL4: ”We’ve been listening to your feedback and addressing your concerns. In ForkLift 4, we’ve squashed numerous bugs and implemented user-requested features. Your experience is our priority, and we’re committed to making ForkLift the best file manager for you.” Now let’s look at some of the changes and issues with FL4, to see if what they said is actually true or not. Any comment that the dev’s replied with will be in parentheses.
REMOVED/MISSING FEATURES
– Removal of spacebar to select/deselect items (“Unfortunately, we have removed keyboard selection, the option to select items with the Space bar.”)
– Removal of commander style keyboard shortcuts (“We have removed the option to switch to the Commander style keyboard shortcuts”)
– Removal of touch bar support
– Recent locations section of the “Go to folder” window is missing (“we’ll try to fix that soon”)
– Missing tons of different language localizations that exist in FL3. (“X language is not available in FL4 yet”)
– New UI is less functional – Line spacing/padding makes it so that, when the window size is the same, there are less visible items in FL4 than FL3.
– Can no longer click the favorites button to close the favorites section once opened, only hitting ESC will close it. (“It is not a bug that you can’t close the Favorites from the toolbar the same way as in ForkLift 3. You can only exit that view with the Esc key right now.”)
– Default Folder X support lacking (“There is some support for it but the toolbar icons are missing. We will try to add the same integration as in ForkLift 3 soon.”)
BUGS
– App crash when dragging and dropping tabs from one pane to the other (“We tried to fix the crash that can happen when the tabs get relocated, but it seems that there are still issues with that.”)
– OneDrive connection’s will show the same file displayed multiple times, essentially showing phantom files.
– Certain cloud connections (like iCloud Drive) are not showing all files. They show fine in Finder and other applications.
– When disconnecting from a server, the directory structure for that server is often, but not always, still visible. (“Known issue that’s on their bug tracker.”)
– Various bugs with applying themes. One is that, when using dark theme on the system, selecting light theme in FL4 and then going back to the default theme in FL4 will continue to use the light theme, instead of defaulting to the OS setting (dark theme).
– Bug with the registration process hanging forever when pasting the registration key in. You must force close the application and open it again, at which point it does show that it’s registered. (“If I understand this correctly, you have managed to register ForkLift 4 with your key, so this issue doesn’t need to be solved any longer.”)
– Performing the “New Folder with Selection” option is slow compared to FL3.
– Various random crashes or freezing in FL4.
Even with all those bugs, the dev states “ForkLift 4 is way more stable than ForkLift 3.” That’s straight up not true, since FL3 doesn’t have those problems. The fact that a bug like “dragging tabs between panes causes a crash” exists, then is released in the first official version of FL4, tells you that FL4 is rushed and in a broken state compared to FL3. That’s a common feature that is used in any multi-pane file manager, yet they release FL4 knowing that it doesn’t work. I’m not sure how they could honestly claim that FL4 is more stable than FL3.
To discuss the new licensing model for a moment, I think the model would be alright if there was actually some good improvements in FL4, but that’s not the case. A new (questionable) UI does not make up for all the missing features that existed in FL3. Not to mention, all the bugs in FL4. In addition, we have seen that FL3 hasn’t gotten an update in a year, so this new model makes even less sense when the devs don’t even actively update the product. They even admitted that they knew of bugs/crashes in FL3 that they didn’t fix (“But yes, there were known crashes in ForkLift 3 that we didn’t fix”). Instead, they focused on releasing FL4 in a broken/worse state (compared to FL3) and pushing this new licensing model on people for a worse product. I’m not sure how anyone can trust them when they admitted to purposely not fixing problems in FL3 and then think paying a subscription for updates is going to make things better.
I’m not sure how they can seriously act like this is an improvement when so much was removed or is broken in FL4. When their primary excuses for missing features and bugs are either “We removed that” or “We will look at fixing that,” then the product clearly isn’t an improvement, especially when they can’t even provide a list of true improvements (because they don’t exist).
The way this whole release has been handled and their attitude/replies show that they’re out of touch with their customer base. Not only is the product worse, but they think we’re all stupid and continue to lie and make excuses for all the problems in FL4. They’ve lost me as a customer.
It looks like you guys are now going to introduce an annual payment and the “update” will cost exactly the same as the full price. IS THAT A JOKE?
My current version will be the last one, there is NO reason to “upgrade”, especially since there are free competing programs.
It’s not a problem to pay for an upgrade if it’s worth it. If not, we can keep using the current version. And I think that’s fair. After all, developers need to get a salary to live 🙂
The problem is that FL4 is quite of a downgrade as Tom above explained very well.
After few days of use, I like it very much, it’s much faster than FL3, and don’t find it very expensive.
Thank you for the positive feedback.
I don’t like to fight anymore and get angry that simple basic functionalities don’t want to be implemented. They are simply not willing and able to address wishes (selecting items via spacebar- analog FL3) from numerous users. These are not new feature requests, but identical functionality of FL3. I don’t even want to comment on the overpriced pricing model… less features for a new UI, really?
It’s already clear why they deliberately omit a changelog, because it’s already embarrassing, new major version with fewer features. That’s what you get when you have cheap young developers at the start. How to do it right shows qspace pro. That’s all I’m saying. Absolutely cheap, runs on intel/apple chipset, lean, clean changelog and betas, connections without end and and and… The best: The developer will be very happy to take care of the function “select items with spacebar” 🙂 There are capable developers who can not only handle standard frameworks, but still have brains to find solutions. So, that’s it here… Too bad, I was very happy with FL3 for a long time, but here with FL4 everything is done wrong, what you can only do wrong.
Hmm, I already checked QSpace Pro. It’s a Chinese product. Don’t get me wrong but installing software developed in China with full access to all files on my Mac… Well, I do not feel comfortable, at least.
I noticed that and agree with you as well. I’ve been keeping an eye on traffic in Little Snitch and haven’t seen anything sketchy yet, so we’ll see. It’s on sale right now for a pretty big discount, so I took advantage of that just in case I do end up using it long term. Worst case is I’m out $16 (that includes all extensions they offer), which is still less than ForkLift 4.
Thank Tom! Very useful post!
However, proving that the app is not doing anything malicious during your traffic monitoring unfortunately is not proof that it will not do in the future. Trojan horse can sleep and being triggered anytime.
Offering a big discount makes me even more suspicious, plus invitations…
Just reading Privacy Policy:
“What Personal Data do we collect?
1. QSpace version and account email address, macOS version and language, IP address, user ID and device ID.
2. PayPal payment related information: name, email address and address.
How do we use Personal Data?
The information we collected is only used for QSpace functions and will not share with any third-parties.”
Last part simply cannot be true in China. Every company has to share anything that CCP asks for.
Oh I know that it could be some delayed action that doesn’t show itself until a later date, or be added in some version. It’s gone at least a few years without apparently being malicious, so I’ll roll with it and just pay attention to see if anything weird happens. Just wanted to report what I’ve seen thus far. Everyone can decide for themselves.
Forgot to add, that data mentioned in the privacy policy is pretty standard for most applications. Most collect system, network, etc info for various purposes. What’s honestly surprised me the most is that it’s not using any third party analytics API. It seems like 90% of apps these days try to connect to Google Analytics, Firebase, etc. I’m always seeing apps wanting to send data to them and always block it with Little Snitch.
The email address stuff is because they use your email address to tie the licenses to you. I just ended up using a new email account on my mail server, using one of my spare domain names that I have, just so they don’t have my primary email address (not that I’m really concerned, I just like an additional level of privacy).
I’d agree that the CCP stuff is always a concern. Personally, I doubt that the CCP cares about a random small dev’s app when they can get massive amounts of data from things like TikTok. Just my opinion. To reiterate, I’m not trying to convince you, or anyone else, to use it. Just providing my thoughts.
No problem at all Tom. We are just having a nice conversation. Surprisingly, Binarynights is tolerable so far 🙂 I hope, Binarynights will take that as a challenge to make their own app better than QSpace.
Anyway, besides sending data to China, I’m concerned about giving access to all my files to a (small) Chinese company. If something goes wrong, file system corruption or if they decide to encrypt all my files…
So I’m saying goodbye to ForkLift after 15 years of use. I just bought QSpace Pro. ForkLift 4 looks like an unfinished toy next to QSpace Pro.
I have been facing an issue with accessing my SFTP accounts ever since I upgraded to version 4. However, it was working perfectly fine on version 3. I am not sure if this issue is connected to my v4 license from Setapp. Can you please assist me in resolving this issue? Thank you.
Please contact us in an email regarding this issue at support [at] binarynights [dot] com. If you have contacted us already, then we will try to come back to you soon.
There’s a small bug since at least FL3:
1. Select a file with hidden extension
2. Start renaming it
-> the extension is now visible
3. Cancel renaming with ESC, click somewhere else or just hit enter without changing the file name
-> the Extension stays visible until restarting the app
If you actually change the file name and hit enter the extension disappears.
Thanks for reporting. We will try to fix that, but currently this is not high on our to-do list.
I came across a basic missing feature in Forklift 4 that was in 3 and is Finder. I had a big file and wanted to check the exact size in bytes. I found I can’t do that. I get values like 2.4 MB instead of the byte count, even in the Info window.
Thank you for reporting this. I have added this to our bug tracker.
Dear Binarynights. I am another one of those long-time FL users, who have a lot of negative emotions as a consequence of the “new” business model.
Would you give me a honest answer to this question of mine? Did you involve your customers when developing the new business model and ask them for input?
A change in the business model can indeed be inevitable, but it really does matter how you prepare and execute it. From the reactions of agnes on this forum, I have the feeling that you haven’t put on the shoes and glasses of your customers when making the decision.
What would save my customer experience in this moment would be an upgrade price to FL4, as a gesture of good will. I believe this could be the case for many others. Otherwise I am out I am afraid.
We posted about the new model 3 years ago in our blog: https://blog.binarynights.com/2020/09/28/forklift-new-business-model and on Twitter. As you can see, there aren’t many comments below the post but on Twitter, the reaction was positive and the users did understand why we wanted to switch to this model and supported our decision. We have even switched to this model a year ago, which wasn’t really noticed by many because the change wasn’t affecting them.
We will try to write another post explaining why we have decided to go with this model, but I think everything is explained in the old blog post as well.
The software industry shifts towards subscriptions for a reason, and the reason is not that these companies are greedy. We didn’t want to go with subscriptions so we wanted to find a way between the two models. The problem is that a part of the users don’t really seem to understand that they don’t have to renew their licenses if they don’t think that the new updates are worth their money. If you buy a license with 2 years of updates, then now you get an additional 200 days of updates on top of that, which are almost 3 years. You don’t have to buy a new license immediately after that, you can keep using ForkLift without any issues. You can easily use ForkLift 4 for let’s say 3,5 years for $35. And when the 2 years license expires, ForkLift will have more than 2,5 years of new updates installed, it won’t be the same app as it is now.
Since companies need a steady income, they usually have two choices, they switch to the subscription model or they release new major updates every 2 or 3 years. If we released a new major update every 3 years for $35 you would have the same thing as now. If you compare all models, you will see that almost all of them are the same thing wrapped and packaged differently. We wanted to give users the option not to need to continuously pay to access the app (subscription) and we wanted to give us the freedom to add new features to ForkLift continuously and not have to wait 2-3 years, which you have to do if you use the one-off payment because you can’t add new features if you have to save those for the next major release to actually sell the new version.
ForkLift 3 was released more than 6 years ago and ForkLift 2 13 years ago, a user calculated that using ForkLift cost him less than $1,4 per year. He never really understood how that would be sustainable for us. That is not sustainable for us and that price is not normal. If you look at apps that take screenshots, you will see that they cost around $10 and they can only take a screenshot and then put a background behind it. I have even seen screenshot apps that cost you $10/month. Even the theme editor in ForkLift 4 is more complex then those apps. And then I haven’t even started to talk about the different protocols that have hundreds of pages of documentation and need to be maintained constantly. To maintain an app like ForkLift takes a lot of effort, which can’t be financed the same way as before. Just one issue that we faced recently: A user wrote that the last letters from the folder names on his server were missing. We had to investigate that, which can take very long and then we had to fix the issue, even though his server was set up incorrectly and ForkLift did everything correctly, we added a workaround to deal with this problem. There are tons of issues like that which only affect a few users, so most users don’t even notice the issue and they don’t notice that something was fixed in the background. We also have to answer hundreds of emails an comments like yours which take a lot of time and so on. We can’t maintain the company if we continue with rare major updates (6-7 years) with one-off purchases offering the lowest price of our competitors. This is the reality. If you think that the price of 4-5 Big Mac menus is too high for at least 930 days of ForkLift, then we are sorry to loose you as a customer, but we won’t change our model back to the old one. I hope you take into consideration all the things that I have tried to explain here, which should have been a blog post:)
I read a whole post 🙂 And I agree with you and about sustainability, etc. The problem, at least for me, it’s not your new business model. I think it is fair. The problem is that FL4 is not bringing anything really new and missing some “pro” features I like (damn keyboard selection). Basically, for me FL4 is a downgrade and I would not use it even if it’s free or you pay me.
Where is the shortcut for going to the parent folder, please? Also, I’m missing shortcuts profile as Commander. Any chance to bring it back?
You can go to the parent folder with the Go > Enclosing Folder command, which has the Command-Up Arrow keyboard shortcut. You can set all the shortcuts individually, if you want to use the Commander style shortcuts that were available in ForkLift 3, then you only have to modify these commands: Open : Enter, Enclosing Folder : Backspace, Quick Look : F3, Rename : Shift-F6, Edit : F4, Move to Trash: F8, New Folder : F7
Here another updater to FL4.
I tried it, but, just as others say, it is a minor update.
What annoys me most is (V3 and V4) :
* No history of folders. Even a simple terminal based commander Midnight Commander has a history of all folders recently used.
* When connecting to SFTP and the connection fails, it keeps trying indefinitely. No connection timeout can be set.
* (V4 only): When connecting to an existing SFTP, it asks for a password (after a few tries it appeared to be the user password of macOS, not the password of the server) and Touch ID does not work. Luckily it occurs only once, but it is still annoying.
Folder history and connection timeout would be a very useful feature.
1. We wanted to add a recent folder but creating one is more complicated than it seems, so we haven’t created one yet. We want to add a recent folder in the future.
2. We will investigate this issue. If you can, then please send us a console log of such a connection and a test account to the server if that is possible.
Here is how you can get the console log:
0. Disconnect from the server if you are connected
1. Open the Console app (Applications > Utilities > Console)
2. Make sure that your own device is selected in the sidebar
3. Click “Start Streaming” in the main window or the Start button in the toolbar if there are no messages inside the main Console window
4. Search for the name of the favorite that you want to connect to (or if you haven’t added the server as a favorite, then search for the term that is entered into the Server field on the connect panel)
5. In the search field change “Any” to “Category”
6. Make sure that “Include Info Messages” and “Include Debug Messages” are enabled in the Action menu
7. Try to connect in ForkLift to your server
8. Go back to Console and copy the logs
Please send the log referencing this comment at support [at] binarynights [dot] com via email.
3. When the password of a connection is saved in ForkLift, then the password gets saved into the Keychain. When you try to connect to the favorite, ForkLift asks you if you want to allow ForkLift to access the saved password. You need to enter your “login” Keychain password (password of your Mac user) to allow that. If you don’t want to see this window over and over, and enter your password every time, then when ForkLift asks for your password to access the keychain, you need to enter the password (Mac Password) and click “Always Allow”. After that, ForkLift won’t ask you for your user password to access the password of the same server again and it will automatically connect to the server.
Please bring back touch bar support, I paid for this new version, but the usability just worst than the previous one. Also pls bring back the old app icon, this current one looks terrible, I change it for myself back to the old one, but every update overrides it.
I’m sorry but we don’t intend adding touch bar support. I’m sorry that you don’t like the new icon but we won’t bring back the old one. It is possible that we will create a new icon in the future but we won’t use the old one.
I would like to add comment that the ForkLift software is just very great Product, and that I use it daily.
It is way more convenient for me compared to the regular Finder.
Thank you !
Thank you
As an old FL user from version 1.x, I find the upgrade process to be extremely disappointing for long-time customers, especially with such minimal discounts (100 days? Seriously…). I’m glad I read users’ comments before upgrading to FL-4. Now, I’ve switched to Qspace Pro, which offers 4 file manager windows, a feature that’s much better than FL.
– my FL register name: Stone Yu
Thank you for sharing your feedback. We understand that the initial upgrade process caused frustration among some long-time users, and we have taken steps to address this. In addition to lowering the price of ForkLift 4 licenses, we now offer an extra 100 days of free updates to existing users. The 100-day extension provides nearly the same value as monetary compensation, and most users have expressed understanding for this approach. We appreciate your past support and hope that you will find your way back to ForkLift in the future.