The Mac version came later than expected. One of the initial developers was taken off the project, and the others were focusing more on the Windows release. This August, however, uTorrent developer Greg Hazel told TorrentFreak that the first public Alpha version of the Mac release would be ready in a few weeks.

It now seems that someone has beat the uTorrent developers to it, as an early release was posted on The Pirate Bay a few hours ago. A leak of the BitTorrent client, developed in Cocoa, seemed to be inevitable. As mentioned before, it is an Alpha version, and not all the features seem to work like they should (search is broken), but it’s definitely a good start.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak in a response to the leak: “Apparently an internal development build of uTorrent for Mac has been leaked publicly. It has been referred to as an “alpha” quality build. The unfortunate part is that we did not intentionally release this build and would strongly recommend folks not to use it as it isn’t yet complete or stable enough to be released to the public.”

“The good part is that this is a testament to the fact that we’re serious about releasing uTorrent for Mac in the near future. (And counter to recent rumors, this is indeed the uTorrent code-base ported onto OSX, not just Libtorrent with a Mac UI). Hopefully more news coming soon. We have a sign-up page on the uTorrent website.”

Most of the people who have tried the application are reporting that the application is fully functional, but that it’s clearly an Alpha release. Nevertheless, the first reviews are quite positive. “It seems like the uTorrent every Mac-owner has been waiting for is coming,” an early user told TorrentFreak.

We posted some screenshots of the leaked Alpha release below, click to enlarge.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Best selling author Paulo Coelho posted several of his books on BitTorrent, which boosted his sales significantly. The success of Coelho later inspired Leander Kahney, the author of “The Cult of Mac” and “The Cult of iPod”, to do the same.

A recent discussion on the positives and negatives of piracy confirms changing attitudes towards it. The “behind the scenes” thread on O’Reilly Radar was started by Eric Freeman, who wrote:

“Any thoughts on the rise of Head First titles (mostly HFDP and HTML) on Pirate Bay? I’m trying to just take it as a sign there is strong interest in the books still.”

The consensus among the authors who replied seems to be that having one’s book listed on BitTorrent sites is a good thing, and might actually generate more sales.

Nat Torkington wrote in a reply:

“So long as the royalty checks are strong, take BitTorrent as a sign of success rather than a problem. A wise dog doesn’t let his fleas bother him.”

Phil Torrone of Make magazine added:

“Yup – seeing your books / magazines on Pirate Bay is always a good thing.”

Piracy is less of a threat to book publishers than it is to the music industry though. As Nat Torkington notes, most people still prefer printed copies: “The HF books work really well as books, so at best the torrents act as advertisements for the superior print product.”

For music it’s different, as most people now prefer MP3s. The music that is offered on filesharing networks is superior to the DRMed alternatives that are available through music stores such as iTunes. The only option for the music industry is to adapt to the needs of their customers and start competing with pirates.

In related news, our very own Matt Mason just got his book “The Pirate’s Dilemma” leaked on BitTorrent. Matt announced that an official “free” version will be available for download later, but I’m sure that he doesn’t mind people sharing this pirated copy.

(Via O’Reilly TOC)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Brokep, one of the site’s admins, released the widget in a post on the Pirate Bay blog. He also mentioned the opening up of the site in the near future, with the release of a public API. This will make it easy for developers to use data from the pirate bay in widgets like this, or other applications.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, BBC’s technology lifestyle program Click had an item on The Pirate Bay and interviewed Brokep (Peter) and TiAMO (Fredrik) in their natural habitat.

They once again stick it to the movie and music cartels, with Brokep commenting on the morality of downloading copyrighted content: “I don’t care, that’s the big thing, I don’t care. If I want it, I take it, ’cause I can. It might be moral to some people but I think it’s up to me to decide.” You can watch the full show over here.

Download The Pirate Bay Top 10 Dashboard widget (92kb ZIP)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

David Watanabe, the developer, has now released Xtorrent 1.1 (beta). Here’s what’s new:

Interface changes
Xtorrent has gotten what the developer calls a “newly refreshed user interface”. New, sleeker-looking toolbar buttons that resemble those in the Leopard Finder, including a number of other interface tweaks have been added.

Selective Downloading
What was one of the most requested features, followed by encryption, is the ability to pick and choose which files you want to download from inside a torrent. Xtorrent finally lets you do this. Up until recently, Azureus was the only Mac BitTorrent client that could do this. Transmission added the feature a few weeks ago.

File Prioritisation
You can now tell Xtorrent which files in a torrent you want to give more priority to and have downloaded first. This was another oft-requested feature, according to Watanabe.

Xtorrent is quickly becoming the uTorrent of the Macintosh. Not uTorrent Mac, which we gave you a preview of, but the Mac equiavalent of uTorrent Windows. It’s light, has many important features and has a pretty UI. The only difference is that Xtorrent is shareware and uTorrent is not. But it’s widely known that the Mac community is a lot more open to shareware than most Windows users.

Unfortunately, Xtorrent still has its drawbacks. Its intrusive shareware policy is still very much there, rearing its ugly head at people without licenses. And some popular private trackers explicitly ban Xtorrent from connecting to torrents and downloading them. OiNK, possibly the most exclusive private BitTorrent site, whose invites are highly sought after, and till they banned the practise, were auctioned off on eBay for ridiculous amounts of dough, has banned Xtorrent. Here’s the message OiNK users who try to download with Xtorrent get:

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The technical specifications of the device certainly make it possible. It has more than enough cpu power for it, assuming a nice, tightly coded client was written. The built in WiFi (802.11b/g) and use of the EDGE 2.75G wireless network data transfer system allows a fairly widespread availability of reception.

According to one of the developers of the ‘iPhone-binutil‘ project, going by the name ‘geohot’, the only obstacle stopping it from making an application like “iTorrent” happening is their current lack of coding ability for the iPhone. The file system is open, and media players already exist, if for nothing else than playing media from iTunes.

On of the downsides it that, for many, the 3.4Gb free on a brand new phone (or 7.4Gb, if you went for the bigger one) may not be enough to hold much data, but it all depends on what you torrent. Bigger problems are that the battery will last only in the region of 6-8 hours at best (according to Apple’s figures) which isn’t the greatest. Additionally, many users have reported the wifi connections being on the slow side as far as data transfers go. Using EDGE is a lot slower, about 30k/sec max.

Of course, the benefits are that you can carry it around with you, and you have the wide range of content available, with the benefits of torrent file’s typical pricing (free). Of course, time will tell. Meanwhile, the lack of MMS on the iPhone has been a small thorn in the side of many owners. However, there is help at hand in the form of a workaround. More details here

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Let’s start off with some screenshots.

The Installation Disk Image

Main Window with Downloads

Click to enlarge.

Speed
The main reason I like uTorrent so much is because downloads are considerably faster in it than in any other BitTorrent client. This held true when I compared uTorrent Mac to Transmission and Xtorrent. The downloads speeds in both couldn’t match uTorrent’s. Azureus was the only one that came close, just as I had expected.

Application Launch Time
uTorrent Mac, just like its Windows counterpart, is super-light. It launches immediately (not even 1 bounce in the Dock!). This is clearly one piece of well-coded software. Probably part of the reason why BitTorrent Inc decided to buy it.

Interface
uTorrent Mac has a simple, yet appealing interface that is easy to use and navigate. It’s not as stylish as Xtorrent’s, but then again, no one can create interfaces like David Watanabe.

Search
Though it may seem that uTorrent has some sort of built-in search functionality, currently only offered by BitRocket and Xtorrent on the Mac, it does not. Typing something such as “HDTV” into the search box and hitting return will merely open a BitTorrent.com search page in your default browser.

Conclusion
It’s too early to draw conclusions but it’s a great first impression, especially for a pre-release version.

It’s worth mentioning that some Mac users such as myself like uTorrent so much, we even prefer running it under emulation than using one of the available Mac BitTorrent clients. uTorrent is not only the most popular Windows BitTorrent client according to a poll we conducted last year, but also the winner of our BitTorrent clients comparison.

Many of you are probably dying to download uTorrent Mac. Hang in there, it’s coming real soon.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Announced by Steve Jobs in his keynote at WWDC ‘07, Leopard is the fifth iteration of the Unix-based operating system. It is the “feature-complete” release and is not expected to change much before it goes on sale in October of this year. New features include, among others, a new version of the Finder, the Mac file manager, a new unified interface, Time Machine, a backup application heavy on eye-candy, and Spaces, an integrated virtual desktops implementation.

Creative Commons picture by M. Caimary.

The developer preview was handed out to attendees of the Apple developer conference almost two weeks ago. Normally, one would start to see torrents for such a thing appear hours, if not minutes, after it is handed out. It seems Apple developers aren’t as quick on the uptake as our Windows-using friends. The Vista RTM (Release to Manufacturing) was uploaded even before news sites had the chance to write about Microsoft pushing out its first non-beta release of Windows Vista.

Titled “Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard 9A466 WWDC ‘07″ or “The New Big Cat”, Mac OS 10.5 can be found on almost every torrent site on the web. But before our Mac-using friends rush to download a copy for themselves, it’s best we mention that this is beta software, and even if no new features are going to be added to it, the OS is reportedly buggy and requires work. We recommend you hold out till its release in October and buy yourself a copy. It’s cheap.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Like BitTorrent, the application supports multi-source which means that the transfer speed will increase when more people share the same file.

Another great feature is that you link directly to files in your Alliance network when you are chatting with friends, which makes sharing files even more easy. For all files on the network you will see a download speed indication, the more people share the file, the faster it will be of course.

The latest version of Alliance (0.9.8) is designed to share files securely and uses a very simplistic encryption algorithm, but there is experimental support for more advanced algorithms.

Personally I think that the application has much potential. It could become very popular on University campuses for example ;)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

iPodifier helps you to organize all these downloaded TV-shows, Movies, or other video files. It automatically transcodes these shows, generate playlists, imports the shows into iTunes, and syncs them with your iPod.

The application works great in combination with BitTorrent, TiVo, or any other video source. All you need to do is select the source (download) folder, add the appropriate filters and you’re ready to go. You can choose from low, medium or high quality output, and have the option to select the mpeg4 or h264 codec.

Here’s a list of some of the features:

Unfortunately iPodifier only works on Windows, there are no plans to develop an OS X compatible version in the near future.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Since then, a lot has changed. As expected, a lot of bugs have been stomped out and the overall performance of the app has been improved. Significant new features include a redesigned swarm column, drag-and-drop support, the ability to browse the file structure of torrents, RSS (torrentcast) support and multi-tracker support.

The most prominent new feature Xtorrent has gained is an in-built RSS catcher. This makes it easy for users to subscribe to BitTorrent feeds right inside the application, instead of having to use a separate RSS reader and then manually (or automatically, depending on your ‘autodownload’ settings) add the torrents to Xtorrent.

Many people seem to be outraged at the fact of paying for a BitTorrent client, but it seems Xtorrent has a lot going for it. Other than Azureus, it’s the only Mac BitTorrent client that can subscribe to RSS feeds, and the only one that can do so without a plug-in. It’s also the only stable client for the Mac with in-built search. BitRocket was the first to implement this, but is still very buggy and crashes often.

David Watanabe, the developer of Xtorrent, says that the first non-beta release is “on the horizon” and that he expects to release it within the next few weeks. The third public beta is pretty stable and doesn’t seem to have any bugs, but Watanabe nevertheless warns that there might “likely [be] undiscovered bugs.” He is currently offering Xtorrent at a discounted pre-release price of $15.89. Once 1.0 is released, the price will go up to $18.99.

Note: Xtorrent is free to use for now, and doesn’t require a license. But despite the fact that it’s a useful app with a sexy UI, it has yet to replace Transmission (beta) as my primary BitTorrent client. I have a soft spot for FOSS.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The problem with the mainline client is that it’s not a Universal application, so running it on an Intel Mac is like watching cheese ferment. There is a Universal beta, but is still very buggy and refuses to close, you have to force quit it. And Azureus is a memory hog, partly because it’s written in Java and partly because it’s such a feature-full application.

So, there is a need for a lighter alternative. Well, we’ve found an alternative, and it’s as light as it gets. A developer by the name of Wojtek has released a widget that makes creating torrents as easy as dragging and dropping a file or folder onto your Dashboard. It’s called CreateTorrent and is really simple to use.

The only thing you need to do once you’ve downloaded and installed it on your Dashboard is add an announce (tracker) URL. Just flip it around and you’ll see three input boxes: Announce URL, Port and Output Filename. The only one you need to change is the Announce URL, ie. a tracker address. Mininova compiles a list of “frequently used” public and private trackers that you can use. Most people just use The Pirate Bay’s tracker:

http://tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce

Initially, the widget just refused to work. But then, I wanted to find out what exactly was wrong and opened it with Azureus instead of Transmission, the client I normally use. Turns out, it was an issue with libtransmission, the core library of the two BitTorrent clients I tried to seed the torrent with, Transmission and Acquisition. When I opened the torrent with Azureus, it just worked.

Download the torrent I made with CreateTorrent: Noite de Carnaval by Code (.torrent).

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Speaking on a panel at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) , Navin said that Apple’s Fairplay and Microsoft’s new Zune DRM were too restrictive because content encoded in these proprietary formats locks users into a single ecosystem. What if a user wants to purchase a device produced by another manufacturer? All the content he has already purchased will be incompatible. This will cause the person to pirate the content he has already bought, possibly more than once. “The lock-in you get from iTunes [or Zune] is great when you love the device you got from either one of those vendors,” he said. “But if you don’t, the amount you’ve invested [in purchasing media files] is worthless,” he said

Is it Navin’s place to criticise DRM when his own company is about to launch a video store that is going to offer content “infected” with Microsoft’s platform-dependent Windows DRM? To be fair, BitTorrent Inc says that if they had it their way, content on their upcoming video store would be completely free of DRM. Apparently, it was the content producers who were adamant about it.

This isn’t the first time Navin has made a controversial statement. Last month, he was quoted saying that his company’s site, BitTorrent.com doesn’t index illegal torrents, something we proved was clearly not the case.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The Quicktime servers are crippled right now, good thing we still have BitTorrent. Note that this is not the official video.

And if you just can’t get enough, check out the The Complete Apple Keynote Collection, courtesy of The Pirate Bay.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Here’s what you need to do:

That’s it, you’re done. Now whenever you send your IM account that’s logged in at home a torrent file, it’ll automatically start downloading it! A simple, yet effective solution.

Have you already tried this, and has it worked for you?

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Why would the company open source uTorrent?
There are many reasons for them to do so. One of the many advantages would be to get it quickly and easily ported to other platforms such as OS X and Linux, a task the company has promised to get done. “[uTorrent is] lacking an implementation for Mac and Linux. We will improve uTorrent in these arenas,” said Ludvig Strigeus, the developer of uTorrent in an interview that followed the announcement. Until now he has refused to release non-Windows versions of the client. Also, if uTorrent were made Open Source it would be a lot less likely for its development to stagnate or slow down, there would always be someone ready to maintain and improve upon it.

Reasons not to open source uTorrent
The motivation behind BitTorrent Inc’s acquisition of uTorrent could very well be to have a client that can be customised and morphed to integrate with the upcoming BitTorrent Video Store. If the company were to open source uTorrent, it would not be able to stop users from creating a “clean” version of it, ie. without any Video Store-specific features. This “enhancing” of uTorrent is something users of the client are dreading. A reader of TorrentFreak posted a comment in reaction to the acquisition announcement, “R.I.P. uTorrent!” In a discussion here at TorrentFreak, we came to the conclusion that adding a content store to the client won’t affect most users’ decision to use the program or not. iTunes is a good example of people using a program because of its features, not the openness of its source code. After all, even Azureus will soon have a bundled content store.

By acquiring uTorrent, BitTorrent Inc now has almost 50% of all BitTorrent users in its grasp. They’ve probably paid a hefty price for the client and it’s only fair if they choose not to make it Open Source. The company said in an IRC discussion that followed the announcement that the source code of uTorrent will remain closed for now, but gave no clues as to what their future plans might look like.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Windows DRM has been completely left behind in the portable media player market. The iPod can’t play content restricted (read: infected) by Microsoft’s little virus, and neither can Microsoft’s very own Zune! So, the only consumers who’ll be able to watch videos they have purchased from the BitTorrent Video Store away from their computers will be those who own Creative, Dell, Archos or any one of the other compatible devices. This is, assuming the content from the store will be protected with Janus, Microsoft’s Windows DRM for portable devices. If it isn’t, it won’t play on any portable device at all.

In September of this year Ashwin Navin, the co-founder of BitTorrent Inc said that his company foresees a future without DRM. Although, even then, the company had said that they would use DRM, Navin also made it clear that it would only be in the early stages. Let’s hope the POA hasn’t changed.

Navin made his standpoint on DRM quite clear when he said that “the bottom line is that DRM is bad for the content provider and it’s bad for the consumer.” About foreseeing a future without DRM, he said that he thinks “the future will not be marked by digital rights management. It will be marked by advertising-supported content that’s clear of DRM.” The inventor of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen too says that the company is “very concerned about the usability problems DRM introduces,” and that they are “educating [their] content partners about the lost commercial opportunity.”

To be fair, BitTorrent Inc is only walking down the path of limiting consumers’ rights because it is being forced to. The company is clearly against DRM. According to Cohen, it is the only way they have been able to strike deals with content creators. He says this is “at the insistence of [their] content partners.”

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Bits on Wheels, despite the fact that it’s a 100% native client, was too slow and RAM-hungry for my taste. Transmission on the other hand could probably be called the uTorrent of Mac OS X. And even though it’s possible to run uTorrent in Mac OS X, it can’t be considered a competitor as it has to be run through an emulator. Transmission is less than a MB in size and takes up less memory than any other Mac BitTorrent client.

The last 100% stable release of Transmission is 0.6.1. The latest Beta release is 0.7-svn (993). It is the beta version I’m all excited about as it includes a number of feature improvements/additions and visual enhancements, that make Transmission truly great.

New Icon
The first thing I noticed was that the blue, mechanical-looking icon that is seen in version 0.6 is gone. It has been replaced by a much nicer looking one. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but looks like a lever in a double-arrow shaped frame. Unique and attractive.

Badge Colours
The dock icon badges that display the upload and download speeds have new colours. Instead of fully coloured blue and green backgrounds, they now have grey ones with coloured outlines. This looks a lot classier, and not dissimilar to Xtorrent’s black dock icon badge.

Don’t get the impression that the improvements made to Transmission are limited to eye candy. There’s new stuff under the hood too.

Speed Limit Mode
For starters, there’s now a way to have Transmission automatically limit download speeds at certain times of the day. For example, if you don’t want your browsing speed hindered by your torrents, you could limit it during the day, when you are at your desk. I’ve set it to limit my upload and download speeds to 10k between 11 AM and 3 PM, the hours I’m usually working.

Watch Folder
A feature I was very excited about when I reviewed Xtorrent last month was Autodownload, an option, if activated would automatically copy .torrent files on the desktop to Xtorrent’s support folder and start downloading them. This makes torrenting as easy as downloading files via HTTP, as all the popular Mac browsers save files to the desktop by default. Transmission now has this ability too!

Filter Torrents
Last, but not least, is a Finder-like feature that lets you sort torrents according to their status or by entering a keyword. This could save you some time if you download a lot of torrents at once.

One lingering drawback is that Transmission is still based on the Open Source libtransmission package that is banned by many prominent trackers because of the way it repeatedly “hammers” them (ie. doesn’t obey announce intervals). Its stat reporting has also been regarded as poor. Let’s hope something is done about this. Either libtransmission should be improved or the developers should switch to using libtorrent instead.

Overall, Transmission 0.7 Beta has this polish that I’ve only seen in Shareware Mac apps like Acquisition and Disco. Best of all, this excellent piece of software is Open Source and available to anybody for $0.00!

Download the Beta (.dmg), or visit the Transmission site.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Navin told Jemina Kiss at the Mipcom festival:

“Apple is a phenomenal company – we’ve hired engineers from Apple and know the caliber of the talent and creativity. Fundamentally Steve Jobs has challenged an entire value chain, whether it’s publishers or the consumer electronics industry. But Apple is only as good as the weakest link because that’s all forged and locked in together. If people stopped wanting iPods because a better piece of hardware came along, the whole thing would fall apart.”

Navin continues:

“We think the second phase of iTunes and digital distribution is not about Apple, but about the best hardware, the best content and the best delivery system – and that’s BitTorrent. We’re not hamstrung by a hardware business. We care about delivery and we care about content, and as long as there is good content in the world – which is guaranteed – we’ll be successful.”

Navin admitted that he always wanted to work at Apple. He ended up at BitTorrent, but perhaps he can try to work with Apple now. Apple is not ignoring the power of BitTorrent, they have plans to include a BitTorrent powered content delivery system in OSX.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

The widget is created by TyrantBuilt, he also included quick links to TorrentFreak’s latest articles, and the TorrentFreak homepage.

The widget currently supports the following sites:

* bitoogle.com
* BitTorrent.com
* fenopy.com
* btjunkie.org
* demonoid.com
* hypertorrent.com
* btmon.com
* mininova.org
* myBitTorrent.com
* newtorrents.info
* thepiratebay.org
* torrentportal.com
* torrentreactor.net
* torrentspy.com
* torrentz.com
* yotoshi.com

This is the first release of the widget, TyrantBuilt is planning to add more BitTorrent search engines in the near future. If you’re missing your favorite site, or if you want to suggest an option, please drop a comment and we will pass it through to him.

For now, enjoy.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Fenopy is constantly looking for features that may enhance the “user experience”, and usability of the site. Last month they implemented their “share on your blog” feature, a visually attractive way for bloggers to share torrents, without running a tracker.

TyrantBuilt, the developer of the widget told TorrentFreak that he will release updated versions on a weekly basis. He even offered to make a TorrentFreak widget for the latest articles, pretty cool.

Fenopy Widget (Macupdate)

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.