UPDATE: Techspansion bit the dust, so for now, the beta of Propagator can be found here.

Reading TUAW this morning, I found a new application called Audialhub from Techspansion, the makers of iSquint and Visualhub.  While browsing Techspansion’s website, I came across a free application called Propagator.

Propagator provides a GUI for pushing out files to Macs on your local network.  This is useful for OS X system administrators who wish to update all of their managed client machines with a specific file, most commonly property list (.plist) files.

This functionality can also be achieved using Apple Remote Desktop, but a free alternative is always worth taking a look.  My two favorite aspects of Propagator are it’s Common Places drop down menu for quickly specifying common locations to drop files (such as long ~/Library paths), and it’s Set Ownership check box for giving proper ownership of the file to the right user accounts.  The option to Lock Files After Copy prevents users (in my case, students and unknowing faculty) from messing with your work, accidentally or not.

Propagator is currently in public beta, so I’m interested to see if any other features or improvements are made with the final release.