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Fetch 5.8.3 adds support for macOS 13 Ventura 16 Jan 2023 8:26 AM (2 years ago)

Fetch 5.8.3 is now available for download. This release adds support for macOS 13 Ventura. In addition, Fetch 5.8.3 fixes a number of bugs. See the release notes for details.

Fetch 5.8.3 is a free update if you purchased your Fetch license after January 28, 2009; otherwise an upgrade is $10, and a new license is $29. Fetch 5.8.3 requires macOS 13 Ventura, macOS 12 Monterey, macOS 11 Big Sur, macOS 10.15 Catalina, macOS 10.14 Mojave or macOS 10.13 High Sierra.

Please download Fetch 5.8.3 from the Fetch Download page, or by choosing Check for Update… from the Fetch menu. Fetch is no longer available in the Mac App Store; if you purchased a previous version of Fetch from the App Store and wish to upgrade to Fetch 5.8.2, please contact support. And please let us know if you run into any problems with the new release.

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Fetch 5.8.2 adds native Apple Silicon support 9 Mar 2021 4:56 AM (4 years ago)

Fetch 5.8.2 is now available for download. This release adds native support for Apple Silicon Macs, and marks the fourth CPU architecture (after the Motorola 68k, IBM/Motorola PowerPC, and Intel x86) that Fetch has supported over its long history.

In addition, Fetch 5.8.2 fixes a number of bugs. See the release notes for details.

Fetch 5.8.2 is a free update if you purchased your Fetch license after January 28, 2009; otherwise an upgrade is $10, and a new license is $29. Fetch 5.8.1 requires macOS 11 Big Sur, 10.15 Catalina, 10.14 Mojave or 10.13 High Sierra.

Please download Fetch 5.8.2 from the Fetch Download page, or by choosing Check for Update… from the Fetch menu. Fetch is no longer available in the Mac App Store; if you purchased a previous version of Fetch from the App Store and wish to upgrade to Fetch 5.8.2, please contact support. And please let us know if you run into any problems with the new release.

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Fetch 5.8.1 restores Find and font size features 31 May 2020 4:20 PM (5 years ago)

Fetch 5.8.1, a minor update, is now available for download. This release restores two features, the Find command and the ability to change font sizes, that were present in Fetch 5.7.7 but were missing from Fetch 5.8.

In addition, Fetch 5.8.1 fixes a number of crashes and other bugs. See the release notes for details.

Fetch 5.8.1 is a free update if you purchased your Fetch license after January 28, 2009; otherwise an upgrade is $10, and a new license is $29. Fetch 5.8.1 requires macOS 10.15 Catalina, 10.14 Mojave or 10.13 High Sierra.

Please download Fetch 5.8.1 from the Fetch Download page, or by choosing Check for Update… from the Fetch menu. Fetch is no longer available in the Mac App Store; if you purchased a previous version of Fetch from the App Store and wish to upgrade to Fetch 5.8.1, please contact support. And please let us know if you run into any problems with the new release.

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Fetch 5.8 offers compatibility with macOS 10.15 Catalina 8 Dec 2019 10:11 AM (5 years ago)

Fetch 5.8, the 64-bit version of Fetch, is now available for download. The primary feature of this release is compatibility with macOS 10.15 Catalina. Fetch 5.7 users should only upgrade to Fetch 5.8 if they have moved, or will soon move, to Catalina.

A number of features of previous Fetch versions — AppleScript and Automator support, non-English localizations, Kerberos and Bonjour support — are not present in Fetch 5.8. We hope to restore some of these features in future updates.

Fetch 5.8 is a free update if you purchased your Fetch license after January 28, 2009; otherwise an upgrade is $10, and a new license is $29. Fetch 5.8 requires macOS 10.15 Catalina, 10.14 Mojave or 10.13 High Sierra.

Please download Fetch 5.8 from the Fetch Download page, or by choosing Check for Update… from the Fetch menu in Fetch 5.7.7. Fetch is no longer available in the Mac App Store; if you purchased a previous version of Fetch from the App Store and wish to upgrade to Fetch 5.8, please contact support. And please let us know if you run into any problems with the new release.

A special thanks to the beta testers who helped bring this release into being. It could not have happened without their patience and enthusiastic feedback.

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Fetch and Catalina 20 Oct 2019 7:47 AM (6 years ago)

Fetch 5.7.7, the current official release, is not compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina. I am working on Fetch 5.8, a 64-bit Catalina-compatible update, and hope to finish it soon. In the meantime, if you have upgraded to Catalina I would encourage you to sign up for the Fetch 5.8 beta test list at this link:

Fetch 5.8 Beta Test List

You will receive a download link to the latest Fetch 5.8 beta version, which will run on Catalina, and you will be notified when there are new beta releases.

If you purchased Fetch 5.7 from the App Store you will need a serial number to run Fetch 5.8 beta releases. You can contact Fetch Support for assistance.

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Thirty Years of Fetch 1 Sep 2019 8:26 AM (6 years ago)

Thirty years ago today my colleagues in the Computing Services department at Dartmouth College were preparing for the distribution of about 1,000 Macintosh SEs, SE/30s, and Mac IIxs, and they needed to start duplicating the floppy disks of software that would be bundled with those Macs. So that was the day I finished Fetch 1.0, the Mac file transfer program that I had been working on all summer.

Many years later I started marketing Fetch as “the original Mac FTP client,” which is sort of accurate. There were Mac FTP clients before Fetch, starting with ports of the UNIX command line ftp client. The first Mac FTP client I ever saw with a graphical user interface was Amanda Walker’s, included in the InterCon product TCP/Connect. There was also Doug Hornig's HyperCard-based FTP client from Cornell called HyperFTP. But as far as I know there weren’t any other stand-alone FTP clients with a Mac user interface in September, 1989, and there certainly weren’t any that are still maintained today.

Fetch’s longevity has been a continual surprise to me. Most application software has the life expectancy of a field mouse. Of the thousands of other Mac apps on the market on September 1, 1989 I can only think of four (Panorama, Word, Excel and Photoshop) that are still sold today. [UPDATE: There are quite a few others.] Fetch 1.0 was released into a world with leaded gasoline and a Berlin Wall; DVD players and Windows 95 were still in the future. The Fetch icon is a dog with a floppy disc in its mouth; at this point it might as well be a stone tablet.

I developed Fetch to solve a specific problem at Dartmouth: we had a bunch of different kinds of central computers — UNIX, VMS, VM/CMS, DCTS — and no easy way to move files between them and the thousands of Macs on campus. But 1989 also brought Dartmouth’s first full-time connection to the Internet, and soon Fetch was being used more for downloading files from far-flung Internet archives than it was for moving files across campus. When the early 1990s brought the first graphical web browsers, I figured Fetch’s relevance had passed; web browsers could download files too, and do so much more. But people didn’t just want to browse web pages, they also wanted to create them and upload them to web servers. For some reason web browsers never got very good at uploading files, and as the web exploded in popularity that left a big niche for FTP clients like Fetch to fill. It’s a niche that has shrunk in recent years, as more sophisticated forms of Internet publishing have become available, but to my amazement it still exists today.

In 2000, when I used game show winnings to buy the rights to Fetch from Dartmouth, it looked like Fetch’s best days were behind it. But that wasn’t the case, thanks to the efforts and high standards of Ben Artin and Scott McGuire, who joined Fetch Softworks and turned Fetch into a real professional product. Fetch made the jump from Classic MacOS to OS X, and from PowerPC to Intel. It got a professionally designed website and UI artwork. I never really knew how to promote Fetch, but word got around, and today our customer database includes orders from 212 different countries, from Andorra to Zimbabwe.

I suppose it isn’t surprising that after a couple decades the excitement of working on file transfer software began to wane. In 2011 we tried to branch out into iPad apps, which was fun and novel and lost money. So I turned back to Fetch, and started work on a total rewrite: Fetch 6. At that point Fetch had over 20 years of testing and debugging, but the source code also had cruft and compromises that had been bugging me for over 20 years. I imagined a new Fetch that had all the improvements that I’d daydreamed about, and none of the old code that made it so hard to implement new features.

This, of course, is one of the classic blunders in software development. It was exhilarating to be free of the shackles of our legacy code. But with a blank slate and no clear destination or deadline, we spent years without getting anywhere close to having a product that we could actually sell. Meanwhile Fetch 5 stagnated, and customers who needed more than Fetch 5 could offer moved on. Sales declined year after year, and Fetch Softworks went from having 3 full time employees and a couple part-time contractors to being a nights-and-weekends effort for two of us.

That experience wasn’t fun, but there was a silver lining. I resumed doing Fetch tech support, and day after day heard from users who still preferred Fetch to the alternatives. I’d been focused on all the things I wanted to change about Fetch, but they were still using it because they liked it the way it was.

In January, 2018 I finally accepted that I wasn’t going to make Fetch 6 happen. Apple had made it clear that 32-bit apps like Fetch 5.7 weren't long for this world, so it looked like the time had come to lay Fetch to rest for good. But I wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye, and it occurred to me that there was a third option, something between finishing Fetch 6 and letting Fetch die: I could port Fetch 5.7’s Carbon user interface to Cocoa and make a 64-bit Fetch 5.8. I wish I’d had that idea 5 or 10 or 15 years earlier, but there you have it.

Fetch 5.8 is now in beta testing; you can sign up to test it here. It currently implements about 90% of Fetch 5.7.7’s features with about 50% of Fetch 5.7.7’s reliability. When I can get those numbers up to 95% and 99%, respectively, I’ll release it as a free upgrade.

Once 5.8 is out I will try to fix bugs and keep it compatible with new OS releases, but I don’t expect to add new features. I think of it being like one of those bands that you’re surprised to see is still touring decades after their last hit. They can still play that song you loved, but you won’t see them on the charts. I don’t expect that Fetch will still be around for its 40th Birthday in 2029. But I’ve been wrong before.

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Fetch 5.7.7 Offers High Sierra Compatibility 11 Dec 2017 6:01 AM (7 years ago)

Fetch 5.7.7 is a minor update that offers improved compatibility with macOS 10.13 High Sierra.

Thanks to feedback from Fetch users we have identified and fixed a couple incompatibilities between the previous Fetch release (5.7.6) and macOS 10.13 High Sierra. The fixes are now available in Fetch 5.7.7.

The complete list of changes in Fetch 5.7.7 are as follows:

Fetch 5.7.7 is a free update if you purchased your Fetch license after January 28, 2009; otherwise an upgrade is $10, and a new license is $29. Fetch 5.7.7 is compatible with Intel Macs running OS X 10.5 or newer, including macOS 10.13 High Sierra.

Please download Fetch 5.7.7 from the Fetch Download page, or by choosing Check for Update… from the Fetch menu in an earlier version. If you purchased Fetch from the Mac App Store, open the App Store application and check the Updates tab for the new version. And please let us know if you run into any problems with the new release.

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Fetch 5.7.6 Improves FTP with TLS/SSL Support 28 Nov 2016 1:09 PM (8 years ago)

Today we released Fetch 5.7.6, a minor update that offers improved support for FTP with TLS/SSL.

Increasing numbers of FTP with TLS/SSL (aka FTPS) servers now require the latest version of TLS, TLS 1.2. It is also becoming more common for FTPS servers to require a feature called SSL session reuse. Both of these requirements improve the security of FTP sessions, so we are happy to be able to offer compatibility with these requirements in this new Fetch release. Please note, however, that Fetch's support for TLS 1.2 and SSL session reuse is restricted to more recent OS X releases (see below for details).

The complete list of changes in Fetch 5.7.6 are as follows:

Fetch 5.7.6 is a free update if you purchased your Fetch license after January 28, 2009; otherwise an upgrade is $10, and a new license is $29. Fetch 5.7.6 is compatible with Intel Macs running OS X 10.5 or newer, including macOS 10.12 Sierra.

Please download Fetch 5.7.6 from the Fetch Download page, or by choosing Check for Update… from the Fetch menu in an earlier version. If you purchased Fetch from the Mac App Store, open the App Store application and check the Updates tab for the new version. And please let us know what you think of the new release.

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Fetch Sierra Compatibility 31 Oct 2016 7:39 AM (8 years ago)

It has been about a month since the release of macOS 10.12 Sierra, which has given us time to gather information about our users' experiences running Fetch on Sierra. We are happy to report that Fetch 5.7.5 is compatible with Sierra, but there are a few issues users should be aware of.

First of all, a number of users have reported errors running older versions of Fetch, such as Fetch 5.3.1, on Sierra. We recommend only running the latest version, which can be downloaded here.

We have received a few reports of users receiving errors when trying to connect to SFTP servers after upgrading to Sierra (for example: "no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-dss"). Sierra includes a new version of OpenSSH, the system SSH software, and this new version deprecates support for some SSH features that are in fairly wide use (for example, DSA/DSS public keys). The solution for this problem is to move to more secure alternatives. If that is not an option -- because, for example, you do not have control over a server using the deprecated feature -- it is possible to configure your Mac to continue using the feature. In that case please contact us for help.

Finally, a number of users have reported a problem clicking on items in the Put dialog. This problem appears to only affect Sierra users with late model Retina Macs, such as the 2015 MacBook Pro and the 5K iMac. On those machines, clicking once on a file name does nothing, and double-clicking uploads the folder containing the file instead of the file itself. We have determined that this problem is caused by a bug in macOS 10.12 and 10.12.1. It affects many other applications, such as BBEdit, as well. We, along with others, have reported this bug to Apple, and hope that it will be corrected in a future System Update. In the meantime, users with the affected machines can work around the problem by holding down the Option key while clicking on file names. We apologize for the inconvenience this causes. UPDATE: it appears that this bug is fixed in macOS 10.12.2. Thanks, Apple!

Many thanks to all the users who have reported their experiences using Fetch on Sierra!

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Problems with Fetch from the Mac App Store 12 Nov 2015 10:17 AM (9 years ago)

UPDATE:

As of November 13, 2015, it appears that Apple has fixed this issue.

To use a copy of Fetch purchased from the App Store please follow these steps:

Please contact us if that does not solve the problem.

ORIGINAL POST:

Since Wednesday, November 11, a number of users have reported problems running copies of Fetch downloaded from Apple's Mac App Store. Some users report an error dialog that states "Fetch is damaged and can't be opened. Delete Fetch and download it again from the App Store." Others report that Fetch quits silently. In either case, deleting Fetch and reinstalling from the App Store does not fix the problem.

Similar problems have affected a number of other applications. We believe that this problem is due to a change in the App Store. I have reported the problem to Apple, and hopefully they will fix it promptly.

In the meantime you can download a free 15-day trial copy of Fetch from:

http://fetchsoftworks.com/fetch/download/latest

It should work without a serial number. Please contact us if you have any problems using the trial copy while the App Store situation is straightened out.

Thank you for your patience.

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