BitTorrent 5.0.5
Saturday 10th February, 2007 12:14 Comments: 0
After a very long time (almost a year?), I decided to check out what's happening with the official BitTorrent client, as I used to modify the source code and compile my own version with some extra cool bits.
It turns out that there was a 4.9.2 release several months back, and there appears to be a brand new 5.0.5 version that I'll take a look at sometime (knowing them, it probably isn't too different to 4.9.2). They haven't said what's different for 5.x on the versions page (other people have noticed the lack of updates to that page in the last 6 months), but they do list what's new for 4.9.2. I've made the features that I'd added - or had something similar to - in my client appear in bold:
Version Notes
2006-05-02: 4.9.2-beta released for Windows, Linux
Changes in this release:
completely new UI
smart download/queuing behavior
smart seeding behavior
torrent priority system
detailed progress bar and "piece bar" progress bar
better save location management ("incomplete" and "finished" locations)
automatic bandwidth management
download rate control
transfer rate graphs
choose which files to download first from a torrent
better error handling and reporting
fast extensions (see bittorrent.org)
torrent "title" support (see bittorrent.org)
multiple tracker support
encryption support
Zeroconf ("Rendezvous") local discovery
sparse files
threaded Disk IO
translation update system
now using wxWidgets instead of GTK on Windows, GUI is now native and should be a lot more stable
removed support for Python 2.2
lots of bug fixes
I believe I also used to complain about their use of GTK instead of wxWidgets, as it made it a lot harder to implement a reliable tray icon feature (I wanted to be able to hide the client to the tray, which I managed to do with GTK, but it was a bit flaky if the client was busy).
It looks like 5.0.5 looks a lot like uTorrent and Azureus. I wonder if 4.9.2 looked the same too. I'm sure the client works fine, but so does uTorrent (smaller, faster, better) and Azureus (platform independent, but uses a lot more memory). I think the update is too little too late. People have moved on. They did that a year ago.
It turns out that there was a 4.9.2 release several months back, and there appears to be a brand new 5.0.5 version that I'll take a look at sometime (knowing them, it probably isn't too different to 4.9.2). They haven't said what's different for 5.x on the versions page (other people have noticed the lack of updates to that page in the last 6 months), but they do list what's new for 4.9.2. I've made the features that I'd added - or had something similar to - in my client appear in bold:
Version Notes
2006-05-02: 4.9.2-beta released for Windows, Linux
Changes in this release:
completely new UI
smart download/queuing behavior
smart seeding behavior
torrent priority system
detailed progress bar and "piece bar" progress bar
better save location management ("incomplete" and "finished" locations)
automatic bandwidth management
download rate control
transfer rate graphs
choose which files to download first from a torrent
better error handling and reporting
fast extensions (see bittorrent.org)
torrent "title" support (see bittorrent.org)
multiple tracker support
encryption support
Zeroconf ("Rendezvous") local discovery
sparse files
threaded Disk IO
translation update system
now using wxWidgets instead of GTK on Windows, GUI is now native and should be a lot more stable
removed support for Python 2.2
lots of bug fixes
I believe I also used to complain about their use of GTK instead of wxWidgets, as it made it a lot harder to implement a reliable tray icon feature (I wanted to be able to hide the client to the tray, which I managed to do with GTK, but it was a bit flaky if the client was busy).
It looks like 5.0.5 looks a lot like uTorrent and Azureus. I wonder if 4.9.2 looked the same too. I'm sure the client works fine, but so does uTorrent (smaller, faster, better) and Azureus (platform independent, but uses a lot more memory). I think the update is too little too late. People have moved on. They did that a year ago.