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Now this is not a pretty interface, and it's probably a little confusing for people who haven't used it before. Beginners probably wouldn't understand the buttons like "ChgDir", "MkDir". "View" and "Exec" and they might be frightened off by that. Maybe, with a bit of intuition, they would figure out that these two arrow buttons are what you push to transfer files from one side to the other. This part of the window displays messages which go back and forth between the client and the server, and it scrolls upwards, sometimes very quickly so that the user might not be able to read all the messages. It seems to me that this is the sort of cryptic background information which should be hidden from the user or at least disguised somehow. It's a three line scrolling area, and if you want to scroll back to view previous messages it can be very difficult because you can't resize it. It's possible to view all the messages in a separate window, by clicking on "LogWnd", but most users wouldn't know what "LogWnd" means.
Up the top of each directory panel we have a little green arrow which means go up to the parent directory -- it's a symbol which would not be immediately recognised by beginners and therefore could make navigation a little frustrating for them. It seems a little pointless having a 'change directory' button, when people can just change directories by double clicking on the folder that they want. As for this white rectangle, that's a file-mask, you can type stuff into it like *.txt and it will display only files with that extension, but there's no way you'd figure that out unless you look at the help file, and even then you'd need to know where to look.
Some other complaints: it uses courier font in the directories which seems a bit large and ugly -- the font can be changed but that probably wouldn't occur to most people. The dates in the date column are not y2k compliant, this version came out in '97. If these windows were bigger or scrolled across you'd see that there's a column which displays the size of the files but it doesn't say whether they're measured in kilobytes or megabytes.
The help is quite good, you can get to it just by clicking on the help button, and if you get stuck on the connect screen, the help button brings up the help section relevant to that. One complaint is, the help is for both the free version and the professional version, all mixed together.
Shortcuts: there aren't many, but the buttons down the bottom have keyboard shortcuts with the relevant letter underlined, thus following a convention. You can also access some commands by right-clicking on the list boxes, but that seems a bit pointless.
Clicking on the options button brings up a window like this with eleven different sections:
These options are laid out in a conventional way. One problem is, you can't get to these options from the connect window. The connect window has its own set of options laid out in a similar way, so this might fool you into thinking that there are no other options, but if you click on "Options" in the main window later you find all these other options and that might be a little surprising.
In conclusion, WS_FTP LE 4.12 is a very basic program which can be quite efficient and easy to use once you read the help files and learn about it. But, considering how intimidating FTP can be for beginners, the software developers should have made more effort to make this software a little more pleasant to look at and a little more easy to understand.
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