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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Desktops, Hardware, Multimedia, Podcasting, TUAW Business

Talkcast live tonight at 10pm ET


Our fearless co-lead Dave Caolo will be aboard the USS Talkcast this evening with me, and we'll be talking turkey -- cooking them, chasing them down, plucking them, and how to get the most stuffing in there. Oh wait, wait? Thanksgiving is over? Oh well then I guess we'll just be talking Mac and iPhone news as usual.

On the menu: Black Friday and the deals we may or may not have been suckered into, new releases from Boxee (read the interview yet?) and uTorrent for the Mac, and since we've got to get our requisite iPhone talk in there, we'll hit on the Linux install, and the tough subject of App Store pricing. Join us, won't you?
Do so on TalkShoe by using the shiny browser-only client; or you can also use the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client that we all know and love. For the web UI, just click the "TalkShoe Web" button on our profile page at 10 pm Sunday. You can also listen in on the Talkshoe page or call in on regular phone or VOIP lines: dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *-8. Talk with you then!

Recording support for the TUAW Talkcast provided by Ecamm Network's CallRecorder for Skype.

Filed under: Internet Tools, Beta Beat

uTorrent for Mac beta officially released


Way back in June of 2007, rumors of a beta version of uTorrent for the Mac first started making waves. For the uninitiated, uTorrent is a super-lightweight BitTorrent client which is widely considered the best in the business. Sadly, it has remained a Windows-only option. A few months ago, an alpha version was leaked (appropriately, on a BitTorrent tracker), but it was alpha, buggy and had a minimal UI (even by uTorrent standards).

Today, uTorrent has officially released its first Mac beta for Intel Macs running OS X 10.5 Leopard. It doesn't have all the features of its Windows counterpart (it's missing the RSS downloader, for instance) but it has a nice interface and the signature uTorrent low-memory footprint.

The only real question will be, is this too little too late? When uTorrent for the Mac was first announced 18 months ago, the BitTorrent client landscape was very different. Transmission was still new and buggy and Vuze (nee Azureus) suffered from significant problems with Tiger and Java. Today, Transmission is a full featured client and Vuze, although still a memory hog, is signicantly faster and more stable in Leopard.

This doesn't mean that it isn't great to finally have uTorrent for OS X -- it just means that the client will need to do more than just exist to get many users to switch over.

uTorrent for Mac is free. It is beta software and it will have bugs, but it is available now.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Filed under: Software, Internet, Software Update

Transmission .90 released

Transmission - the open source, lightweight BitTorrent client that is the closest alternative to uTorrent that us Mac users can get - has just released version .90.

New features added in this update include:

  • Encryption support (finally!), with an option to ignore unencrypted peers
  • The ability to ban peers that send too much bad data
  • Reporting only downloaded and verified good data to the tracker
  • Improved BitTorrent compliance and more

For OS X users, specific updates include:
A per-torrent action menu, optimizations to decrease memory usage, and general changes/updates to the interface to make managing files easier and to provide users with more options.

Note: Users upgrading from version .72 or earlier will lose any data from uncompleted downloads, so please beware and either move your torrents to another program or finish downloads before installing the upgrade.

[via Digg]

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools

Xtorrent 1.0 v40 released with per-torrent bandwidth throttling, list of big features to come


It isn't often that developers unveil their cards, but when they do, their user's ears typically perk up. Such is the case with Dave Watanabe's release of Xtorrent 1.0 v40 in which he announced two big new features now, and a few juicy ones coming down the road. As of this new version, Xtorrent Pro (the registered version) offers per-torrent bandwidth limits and support for the Azureus/utorrent compatible peer exchange, which should apparently help increase some transfer speeds.

Using his crystal ball, however, Watanabe also announced three major features we can strike off the request list: selective file downloading, encryption, and torrentcast auto-downloading (though I should point out that Xtorrent can already subscribe to RSS feeds of torrents - it just doesn't auto-snag 'em yet). Dave announced that these features are "absolutely" planned for a future release (or spread out across more than one), though we'll all just have to sit tight as these things naturally fall under the tried and true "they'll be done when they're done" policy.

Tip of the Day

Holding the Command key (aka the Apple key) and pressing Tab will cycle through your open applications. It's easier to Cmd-Tab if you are Copy (Cmd-C) and Pasting (Cmd-V) to and from various applications.


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