JungleDisk 3.0 Ups and Downs

Updated on 2/6/2010 at 1:36AM EST

JungleDisk has long been my favorite front-end to Amazon S3, and the combination has been my choice for cloud storage (backups, etc.). When I bought in, the application was $25, and you got a version for Mac OS X, Windows (even x64), and Linux, all for that low price. You even got future upgrades for life. In addition, they offered a great incremental backup service for $1 a month as an add-on for S3, which could potentially save you tens of dollars a month or more if you upload large files which change frequently, by only uploading the bits that have changed. The app is great, though, the user interface (UI) is bland at best.

Version 3.0 was just released, and I had hopes that the UI dreariness was going to be addressed. Sadly, all we got were fancier icons in the toolbar. The program is also in need of some additional backup features, like more powerful filtering. These, too, were missing. But more than that, they actually made the UI worse.

First, they changed their website and identity (logo) to match their new owner, Rackspace, which doesn't look too shabby on the site itself. But in trying to create some consistency in the application, they actually made it harder to use. The desktop icon looks really out of place; nothing like a mounted drive. I'd much prefer the stock generic drive icon it had previously. But what would be *really* cool is if they used a drive icon that had vines growing all over it - something "lickable" like the icon used by Panic's Coda application. Instead, we have this pseudo Rackspace/Windows logo, that doesn't seem to be or represent anything "JungleDisk". Very odd. So the first thing I do is "Get Info" on the drive, and paste in a new icon. 

The desktop icon may leave you with the extra chore of swapping it out with a copy/paste, but the real issue is the icon in the menu bar. They again chose to mirror their new corporate icon, which ends up looking like a gray tornado. Yep, stop rubbing your eyes. That's the Tasmanian Devil in my menu bar, and apparently he's pissed and spinning like hell. See the photo below.

Besides the spinning Australian marsupial, what's the problem? Well, the previous icon would flash a noticeable color indicating activity. This one flashes a color so dark and close to the gray used by the icon itself, that you'd need a colorimeter to know that something was going on. Do you notice the color difference in the icon below? If you do, you should be an optometrist.

I guess that I'm basically begging JungleDisk to either revert the icons, or create better ones. This is just insane.

The rest of the UI is clunky, at best, as it has always been. For example, buttons are too close to other objects, like output boxes, callout text is touching the controls they describe, the configuration menu item box is too narrow and cannot be widened, and consequently, you get scrollbar hell. The list goes on and on.

But I have to say, that like the wall flower in high school, face full of braces, skin breakouts, and too much hairspray, if you can get past the superficial stuff, what really counts is pure gold, and you'll want to spend the rest of your life with her, I mean, it. The program itself works extremely well, and there's a server edition too. And for old-tymers like me, the free upgrades and $1 monthly fee has remained in place, at least for the time being. For the newbies, it's a flat $2 per month which includes the program and the incremental upload feature. I'd go for it at that price any day. I recommend you do the same.

But bug them to fix their UI. It's killing me!