Accessing and utilising the services of Amazon's S3 service is not for the average user. Amazon have never created a great UI for this service, but instead have let 3rd parties create a whole raft of tools for pushing data in and out.

I was recently introduced to CloudBerry Explorer. It is a Windows only application, and installs very quickly and easily. It is a beautiful interface which makes working with S3 an absolute breeze.

You have the usual FTP feel about it, with two panels representing either your local machine and a remote S3 account. You can even open up 2 S3 accounts at the same time, and transfer files between them, WITHOUT, having to bring them locally first. A very sweet feature.

Full ACL access is given, complete with a beautiful interface for enabling the CloudFront for any given bucket. Its the small touches that that has impressed me.

• Support for the new Requester Pays feature
• Easily turn on logging for a given bucket
• Decide between the US and EU zones
• Drag'n'Drop files
• Creation of timed URL's

This utility has been released as FREEWARE, which means you are completely free to use it as you see fit. If you are looking for a familiar interface for moving files up and down to S3 then you'll be hard pushed to find something as slick for the price.

Get it here