Speed Download 4.0.2

reviewed by Robert Pritchett

What has happened to Speed Download (SD4) since we reviewed it back in January 2004? Yazsoft added a few things to make it a download manager instead of just a quicker way to download files off the Internet as depicted in this diagram.

Have you ever wanted to download files but when you were not actively using up the bandwidth? Now you can schedule a time to download files. Or you can throttle the pipe and let the download do its thing in the background while you work online.

If you work with others who use SD4, you can run encrypted files between locations and connect and control remotely.

If you are a fan of .Mac accounts and use iDisks, SD4 also is integrated to upload and download files from your .Mac account.

And if you ever experienced partial downloads and had to start over, that is a thing of the past with SD4. It picks up where the file left off and if files are over 4GB, it handles them too. And it keeps a log of what transpired too.

If you’ve been able to wrap your mind around Smart Folders, SD4 knows how to integrate with them.

SD4 can be toggled on and off when using Safari as a browser for recalcitrant sites and can even download partially downloaded Safari files. Simply drag the partially downloaded Safari file onto the SD icon in the dock, and watch it resume exactly where it left off!

If you ever wanted to download a whole website and links, you can.

Oh, and it plays nice in synching with iTunes.

It also works with FlashGot (Mozilla plugin http://www.flashgot.net/whats) and Growl http://growl.info/about.php.  

If you want to learn more, take the tour above.

 What is not in the tour are references to the BitTorrent app called Transmission for cross-platform downloads. http://transmission.m0k.org/

I coincidently downloaded a few updates from MacSpeech (beta of iListen), NetNewsWire, EarthDesk, Macromedia Dreamweaver 8, Skype, Growl and the Sandvox beta. I didn’t expect much, but you know something? This app rocks!  The KB/s (that’s KiloBYTES and not Kilobits, folks) really are similar to the graphics shown above. I’m on a 3MB download link through Charter.net and so far haven’t seen anything above 400 KB/s throughput yet and don’t really expect to, since Charter does a pretty good job throttling throughput on their own (insert tone of sarcasm here).

I even tested the partial download and restart loading function and that actually works like a dream.

SD4 gives Transmit a run for the FTP money by permitting auto-resuming to Put or Get files using SSL to upload or download files from an FTP site. And it can do multiple FTP processes simultaneously.

If you surf the Internet and downloads files a lot, this is just one of those Swiss Army Knife apps that is a “gotta have”.