µTorrent for Mac goes βeta (for real this time)

A couple months after the private beta was ironically released on Bittorrent networks, µTorrent has finally been released for the Mac. I played around with the leaked beta, and while it was buggy, it was really solid: I'm really excited to see Windows' best Bittorrent client finally hit the Mac, if only so I can finally nuke Vuze, which is just a bloated joke.

µTorrent Mac βeta [Official Site via The Apple Blog]

[#1 posted by YTrozS , December 1, 2008 8:46 AM]

I'd like to see how this compares to Transmission, so I guess I'll just have to download the beta and give it the once-over.

Also, am I supposed to ask how this could be ported to the Motorola Krave or something?

[#2 posted by philipb , December 1, 2008 8:54 AM]

Why would you want a port to a Krave? Since coming to work for Motorla I've realized that the Krave does everything anyway. Why just this morning mine made my waffles (after waking me with it's alarm clock), they were delicious.

[#3 posted by TJ S , December 1, 2008 9:03 AM]

The Motorola Krave (motorola.com/krave) already has all of the content you could ever want on it, magically stored on it's incredible microSD card! No need for a Bittorrent client!

Did I mention the Krave?

[#4 posted by TJ S , December 1, 2008 9:05 AM]

Just noticed what you did with the β there. Cute.

[#5 posted by Yreka , December 1, 2008 9:11 AM]

I'll grab it when I get home. Damn blocked school internet.

Though if it isn't all it's cracked up to be, i'll just stick with Transmission.

[#6 posted by Chizu , December 1, 2008 9:15 AM]

Can't find a way to specify download location by torrent, it just dumps everything into my Downloads folder. A little too simplistic.

[#7 posted by lo_fi , December 1, 2008 9:36 AM]

I was bummed to see that µTorrent didn't offer RSS support in the Mac build - it rocked in the XP version. I did find a sweet little helper app on the Transmission support forum that adds RSS functionality: http://tinyurl.com/5afswd . When µTorrent offers RSS support I'll take another poke at it...

[#8 posted by Brettspiel , December 1, 2008 10:26 AM]

Ok, so here's something I've often wondered. How do you pronounce µTorrent? Moo-Torrent? µ is the Greek letter Mu, but it's not pronounced /moo/ as I used to think, rather slightly differently. According to Wikipedia, /muː/ or /mjuː/, but I'm not sure how to pronounce either of those..

[#9 posted by zikman , December 1, 2008 10:39 AM]

I think you can pronounce it either "Yoo Torrent" or "Myoo Torrent"
I vaguely remember reading an article or blog post about how to pronounce it, which is already a pretty mundane and trivial topic... but whatever.
at least it's not as bad as people pronouncing .gif with a soft J. blasphemers

[#10 posted by tinfoil , December 1, 2008 12:35 PM]

It's nice to see that the Mac users get some love, but what of us Linux users? FOr some reason my luck getting it to work under xover office is hit or miss. Either it works or it can't connect to any tracker.

[#11 posted by WeightedCompanionCube , December 1, 2008 1:05 PM]

i think uTorrent is short for micro-torrent, which is what it is. Very lightweight!

...and soon to be very misbehaved, no matter what platform you run it on. Considering the "official" Bittorrent corp endorses uT, this is of concern to anyone and everyone who uses the protocol...

uTorrent are the ones who just said they are going to switch to UDP for peer transfers to try and combat ISP throttling. That's a pretty arrogant move, and flawed for more than a few reasons.

First off, UDP is not what you want to use when you need to establish a reliable connection. UDP is great for communicating with the tracker (short and sweet transactions, a la DNS), but if you are actually pulling chunks, TCP is your friend.

Second, going to UDP isn't going to defeat ISP caps or overage charges on total data per billing cycle. It won't do a thing if your ISP is throtting per-cutomer, not per-protocol. If your ISP is specifically throttling or monitoring bittorrent, all you really need is protocol encryption, which has been there for a while. Use it!

Third: If your ISP is traffic shaping, they probably have a good reason, and it ain't anti-piracy. I love uTorrent, but I'd also like to be able to surf the web if my neighbor is running it. TCP doesn't have the best congestion control, but UDP has zilch. It doesn't matter if you have cable or DSL or fiber, and it doesn't matter if your ISP oversells their bandwidth or not, popular services WILL eat it all if they aren't throttled, and BT is about as popular as it gets.

UDP is probably going to make the congestion worse than unshaped TCP. If a TCP session experiences dropped or delayed packets (such as due to traffic shaping), it backs off.

UDP was designed for things like streaming media, in which a dropped packet is a stutter, no need to retry, life goes on. File transfer over UDP, where every packet counts, is just asking for some brain-dead implementation to blast re-sends as fast as possible when loss is detected.

Do the uTorrent devs think ISPs are going to eliminate TCP shaping because they are suddenly being bombarded with a UDP flood? That's an extremist mentality to put it mildly.

On second thought, UDP bittorrent might actually reduce the load on ISPs by a lot when just about everyone's cheapo router drops dead. Those little cable/DSL boxes can't handle the hundreds of simultaneous UDP mappings a bittorrent session will generate.

[#12 posted by Anonymous , December 1, 2008 1:53 PM]

The name of the client is micro-torrent, they simply abbreviate the micro with the SI prefix symbol for "micro".

Also, I hate to be "that guy", but there's nothing ironic about a bittorrent client being released over bittorrent.
An easy rule of thumb is that irony involves an inherent contradiction, or something against expectations.
(A diabetic walking to the pharmacy to buy insulin is killed by a truck. If the truck is carrying sugar, that's morbidly poetic. If it's carrying insulin, then that may be irony.)

Of course, I'm all for inventing or expanding a word that can apply to these sorts of poetic coincidences.

[#13 posted by blip , December 2, 2008 4:32 AM]

Vuze might be a joke but Transmission has been around for ages and is a very good tracker with regular updates...