uTorrent Releases Long-Awaited Mac Version
Until today, uTorrent – the client of choice for most BitTorrent users – was only available on Windows PCs. Now, after years of waiting, Mac users finally have the chance to try uTorrent, to see for themselves how it fares against the competition.
uTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005, and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent application.
In 2006, uTorrent was acquired by BitTorrent Inc., who continued to develop the application, and promised a Mac version.
The uTorrent for Mac projects started roughly two years ago. Initially it was based on libtorrent, but last year the development team decided to make the client a port of its Windows counterpart. A few months ago, an early Alpha release of the Mac version had leaked to the public, the official release, however, has some significant improvements and is much more mature.
The Mac release only runs on Leopard/Intel Macs at the moment, and is still in Beta. Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak that they are working on getting the bugs in PowerPC fixed as well as back-porting to Tiger. “We’re obviously really psyched that we finally got this beta out there. This is indeed a port of the Utorrent source on top of OSX,” Simon said.
“On Windows, uTorrent is by far the best Bittorrent client out there on a power:performance basis. Following on from uTorrent’s roots, we have continued to focus on only features that users really want, and we have avoided bloating up on lots of clutter. We’re now looking forward to bringing that specialness to the world of Mac-lovers,” Simon added.
uTorrent for Mac can be downloaded over here. Since it is still in Beta, the uTorrent team encourages early adopters to post bugs and annoyances in the uTorrent forums.
