Re: [gftp] marketing: target use case and target audience of gftp

[Sebastien Lumineau <sebastien.lumineau@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there,

I rechecked my boomarks. These confirm I mostly use gFTP in SFTP mode
too. I can't recall what convinced me to use gFTP among others. SSH
with key connection is the main feature I was looking for but I guess
Filezilla support this too. But as far as I remember Filezilla was not
as good to me. My main use is to update some files on a supervision
server that distribute those patches to supervised hosts. So I'm kind
of a "light" gFTPuser. I usually don't transfer large files (couples of 100k) but
I use it frequently (depending on update periods of course). gFTP is
light weight, reliable and does perfectly the job. So I don't see any
reasons to change a tool that fit my needs, right ? 
I started using it many years ago first under XFCE, then Gnome. Today I
use v2.0.19 under LXDE.

> I use KDE and cannot find any good alternative to gFTP.  Its support for
> ftp over ssh is a selling point for me.
> 
> On 03/25/2010 08:28 PM, Zhang Weiwu wrote:
> > Hello.
> >
> > Glad to see someone who start to work on technical improvements. I wish
> > to help on the marketing side.
> >
> > gftp have to have a clear target audience. A typical explanation of "is
> > just another ftp software" would win the audience who finds fun trying
> > yet another thing but not people who look for a tool for particular
> > case. Since gnome have ftp support, why bother to have an FTP software?
> > For me there are at least these reasons:
> >
> > FEATURE LIST
> >
> >    1. gftp offer fine-grain control over overwrite/continue/skip option
> >       on each files, when uploading lots of files. This is useful for
> >       website management.
> >    2. gftp endures broken connection better and show connection broken
> >       (instead of hiding it) on the user interface.
> >    3. gftp supports continue (reget, reput), good for transferring large
> >       files.
> >
> > This list is incomplete, but is only concluded from my own use cases, I
> > hope other people contribute how they /uses/ (not only how they
> > develops) gftp, and get a complete use case table.
> >
> > When we know the use case, we can conclude who are our target audience.
> > >From above 3 use case I consider
> >
> > TARGET AUDIENCE LIST
> >
> >    1. web designers
> >    2. video file manager (transfer large file over network)
> >    3. those who suffer from low quality connection are the target users.
> >
> > >From this on we can further think what other features these target
> > audience would need. For example
> >
> > FEATURE LIST BASED ON TARGET AUDIENCES
> >
> >    1. a web designer might further need mirroring feature, removing
> >       files that was removed locally, she might also need exclusion file
> >       table in the bookmark to exclude '.svn' folders.
> >    2. video file manager might want to run gftp in system tray for a day
> >       or two, and get a report afterwards about upload progress. One can
> >       argue what she really need is gnu screen, but suppose she could
> >       not manage command line tools...
> >    3. those who suffer from low quality connection might need to
> >       download file in many runs, perhaps they need a feature to recover
> >       a transfer session after gftp restarted, by using, e.g. save
> >       current transfer progress to a file and restart it later.
> >
> > This analysis gives two things:
> >
> > LIST OF REASONS TO DO USE CASE ANALYSIS
> >
> >    1. Developers know what feature they should work on if they intend to
> >       reach more users and help users solve more problems, or solve them
> >       better.
> >    2. Webmaster who run gftp website knows how to describe the product
> >       so that others decide to use it.
> >
> > I did not get a full analysis done, there are many other use cases and
> > audiences that are not included, but you see my method, I had been
> > working on software requirement identification for many years, knows the
> > methods and can sense gftp have much more uses than it currently can
> > handle. I hope I can contribute by making it more popular on the means
> > other than developing code.
> >