Transmission, the best torrent application on Mac, have recently released version .80 to the world. The updated features include:
- Ability to selectively download and prioritize files
- Torrent file creation
- Speed and CPU load improvements
- Fix to UPnP
- Rechecking torrents is now done one-at-a-time to avoid heavy disk load
- Better rechecking of torrents that have many files
The most noticeable of the new features is Transmission’s selective downloading of packaged files. This allows you to prioritize files for download if the torrent contains separate and multiple files.
The screen shot below illustrates this feature in use. Unfortunately the downloaded file, Ubuntu, only has one file referenced from the .torrent file but if a few files were referenced I would be able to select which should be downloaded and which have a higher priority than others.
You can access this feature by right clicking on the file within Transmission, then select Show Inspector, then go to Files. Here you can tick the boxes of the files which you want to download and you can rank them in order of priority of download.
The other noticeable update is Transmission’s ability to create torrents for publication.
Both of these features have long been features of uTorrent, the most popular client on Windows, but uTorrent isn’t available on Mac (yet).
uTorrent for the Mac is currently in closed beta. Torrentfreak has more info available, including screenshots.
uTorrent is my personal favorite Torrent application but with Transmission’s recent feature improvements, will uTorrent be able to dominate the torrent world on both the Windows and Mac platform? Competition is always a good thing and I look forward to uTorrent’s arrival on Mac but at least we have a suitable mainstay in Transmission already freely available.
August 12th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
[...] Contact Transmission looking more like uTorrent by the release [...]