Free Files: Week of 10/02/06
Xtorrent
Xtorrent is a BitTorrent client developed by Dave Watanabe of NewsFire fame. It's an advanced torrent client that has been in development for several months. Watanabe says it aims to bring a friendly interface and powerful features to the world of BitTorrent.
Xtorrent features:
- ultra-simple torrent search with one-click downloading (an Xtorrent original)
- a high performance torrent core
- detailed download information and activity monitoring
- powerful seeding and ratio controls
- integration with iTunes
- folder monitoring and automatic .torrent downloading
Xtorrent is still in beta and it is not yet complete, but in a short time of use, I really like it so far, especially since you can search for torrents straight from the client instead of searching through different sites online, then downloading the torrent file and opening it in the client to dwonload all the pieces. It's also one of the better designed clients out there as far as UI, just like NewsFire is.
According to Watanabe's blog: "It probably has quirks, and it will expire when the beta period is over. It’s quite solid and very usable, but there’s a lot of cool stuff yet to come."
There are several other free BitTorrent clients available for OS X. Look forward to a comparison on the features and review on them in a blog next week.
Download Xtorrent at http://www.xtorrentp2p.com/
Firefox 2 RC1
My favorite open source browser, Firefox is making Firefox 2 Release Candidate 1 (RC 1) available for download. It's a preview release of the next generation Firefox browser and is available for Web application developers, the testing community and users who want to get a peek at the next version.
The RC1 download page states that "users should not expect all of their extensions, plugins and themes from previous versions of Firefox to work properly."
The RC download is a Universal Binary that works on both Power PC and Intel Macs.
Messenger for Mac 6
* Chat with Yahoo! Messenger contacts
* Share what you are listening to in iTunes with your personal contacts
* Search for conversation histories using Spotlight
* Check the spelling in your instant messages
I've only downloaded Messenger for Mac to try it out. I actually use Adium, which is a multi-client instant message client that I'll discuss with more details down the line.
The download is available here
Apple has released an update to iTunes 7 which addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more. There have been several reports of bugs with iTunes 7.0 as well as problems with slowness and using a large amount of memory. Since I've download 7.0.1, I noticed it does run a bit faster, and has take care of some of my complaints but it's still quite a memory hog. If you have more than a gig of ram in your system, it should, however, be fine. Download the iTunes update here.
Apple also released an update to OS X. Update 10.4.8, code named Delta, is available for download for Power PC and Intel users through software update under the apple menu on your mac. You can also download the installer from Apple's support section.
From apple.com:
The 10.4.8 Update is recommended for all users and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes for the following applications and technologies:
- connecting to wireless networks using the EAP-FAST protocol
- Apple USB modem reliability
- using OpenType fonts in Microsoft Word
- compatibility with 3rd party USB hubs
- scanner performance
- RAW camera support
- printing documents with Asian language names
- performance of the Translation widget
- broadband network performance
- security updates
Download the Power PC or Intel update.
