Local Explorer and Hosts Tab
This and the following pages show various screen shots of GlobalFTP, and explains how this program works.
This screen shows two main windows, one entitled "Local - exploring Junk", and one entitled "System view for all hosts". The first window looks and acts very similar to Microsoft Windows Explorer, showing your hard dirves and file system directory structure of your own system (hence the name "Local", meaning non-network). You can use this window as you would use Microsoft Windows Explorer, such as draging and dropping files, launching files and programs by double clicking on them, deleting and renaming files, etc.
Although it is quite similar to Microsoft Windows Explorer, there are a few differences. There are no non-file system objects displayed in the window, such as Control Panel, Printers, Recycle Bin and many others. This is because the program is concerned with file transfers, not with non-file objects. Also, you will see a series of "smilies" to the left of some files in the right side of the window. These show the status of file transfers contained in the history section of GlobalFTP: green means the file transfer completed successfully, blue means it is still transfering, yellow means it was aborted or not overwritten, and red means that there was an error in the transfer. See the next section on Transfer History for more information on this.
The next window ("System view for all hosts") is what you use to monitor and control the internals of GlobalFTP. There is a tree view on the left, with corresponding listviews on the right. The left hand tree view consists of a set of host profiles within folders. The host profiles contain definitions to describe a remote site (such as Microsoft's public FTP site) and contain such things as the internet address and the internal "nickname" of the host. The right hand list view contains details of various aspects of the hosts, depending on what notetab is selected along the bottom of the list view. Currently, the "Hosts" notetab is selected, which causes the list view to display details on the hosts, such as the internet address, description, and current network status.
The tree view acts as a filter to select only a certain number of hosts to be displayed in the right hand list view. In other words, if you highlight the folder "Commercial", only those hosts contained in that folder would be displayed in the list view. If you highlight "Microsoft" within folder "Commercial", then only "Microsoft" details would appear in the list view. The caption for this window will change as you highlight different items in the tree view. In the screen shot above, all host details are displayed, since we have the first folder in the hierarchy selected.
The details displayed in the list view, then, are controlled by both the tree view and the notetabs. The tree view filters out different sets of hosts, and the notetabs display various aspects of the hosts. These two work together so you can quickly and easily narrow down your displays to get to exactly what you want.
To open a host, simply double click the host profile in the list view. This will cause a new explorer window to open over the "Local" window above. If there is a directory cache available on disk for your home directory on the remote site, then it is opened and displayed. If not, then the system will automatically go online and retrieve it to cache.
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