Quick way of upgrading WordPress
Since I have not been able to find a reliable and fast ftp client for OS X, I have found a much easier method of upgrading my WordPress install. Here it is in short:
# Upload the zip or tar file to my host
# ssh into my account and unzip the file
# copy over all the files in the resulting wordpress directory into my public html directory using the following command
$ cp -R --reply=yes ../wordpress/* ./
This ensures that all the files are overwritten and I only have to upload a single file. Now granted, this will only work if you have shell access to your hosting account.