utorrent for mac review

hey guys, i was able to get my hands on a closed beta version of utorrent for os x and thought i'd give my thoughts on it because it was something i was interested in and would of liked to see this sort of thing.

well first of all when im back on the windows side of things i use utorrent so obviously i was waiting for this and i have to say it delivers. what is very interesting is that even though its still quite buggy i still use it as my primary bittorrent program at the moment. i do this because on the mac side of things bittorrent clients are horrible.

Vuze/Azureus: i really dont like this client because of its GUI and its dashboard idea trying to get you download their stuff, thats not what im personally looking for in a bittorrent program and for what it is its a resource hog. although once you get into the advanced tab it is nice, why there couldn't be a version with just this side to it i will never know.

Transmission: i very nice lightweight bittorrent app, only problem is its a little too lightweight. had firewall issues and just didnt have the settings i needed to get the right speed.

Xtorrent: a joke, this guy took transmission altered it a little and now tries to charge people for it, although his improvements were good, still no good definitely don't support this guy.

Utorrent for mac isn't revolutionary and if you want to get a feel for what it'll be like just get the version for windows and have a play around because they are very similar. Utorrent for mac just fixes everything that is wrong with os x bittorrent apps.

Features: practically the same as the windows version so i'll just speak of what more has been done with the os x version.
at the moment a few of these features dont function but they do seem very promising.
Search: this client allows for searching all the popular torrent indexes.
Quicklook: this is something that looks very positive although isn't functional at the moment.
and it uses practically no system resources, even in its early beta stages, i have dashboard widgets that use more of the system resources.

That is all i can think of for now, and my conclusion would be that utorrent isn't spectacular or revolutionary it is just what a bittorrent should be and the reason its great is because no one else can get it right.

sheldon

 

Well, that definitely sounds good as I've been waiting for uTorrent to be ported to OS X. Currently, I am using Transmission and believe it to be the top torrent client currently released for OS X. As for uTorrent, it is still beta like you mentioned, so I'm sure those features that aren't functioning at the moment will be fixed when a stable version is released.

 

Azureus has encryption, meaning its the only way for me to actually use torrents if i wanted to.

Last time I checked, there wern't many in osx (if any?) other then azureus that have encryption.

So if you're throttled by your isp, then azureus is almost the only choice. even though it has its flaws.

Dunno if it has encryption in windows, but does it have encryption in osx?

 

yeah the windows version of utorrent supports encryption and the same feature is available in the mac version as well which is good news, even though i dont use it.

 

I wasn't so impressed with uTorrent on Windows, and switched back to Azureus there too.

However, I am with the OP when it comes to Vuze - I got my brother to install it and first hat to explain to him how to get rid of the idiotic Vuze dashboard. I do that automatically when Azureus starts - CMD-1 on the Mac and you have the good old Azureus view back. Which has all the information you need and none of that Vuze misconception.

I am thinking - last time I checked, Azureus was open source. So wouldn't it be very easy to create a new BT client by taking the Azureus source code and packaging it _without_ Vuze? If I have some time on my hand, I might look into it.

Main reason I preferred Vuze was that I often leave torrents running overnight, or over several days (slow connection here in this country!). And uTorrent crashed on my too often to make this feasible. uTorrent crashed in the middle of the night, meaning I missed out on 8 hours of downloading time once. uTorrent also crashed on me a few times during normal use, at one point I had to re-download over 1GB because it lost the data. Azureus, on the other hand, has always been rock solid and stable through the worst internet connection you can think of: Up and down every hour, sometimes slow, sometimes loses DNS, etc. Azureus handles it like a champ. Never crashed, never lost data. And that in I don't know how many years of use.

 

I thought the uTorrent project for OSX died? Anyway, how did you get a beta version?

 

It doesn't look like its dead. They still have an option to sign up for latest news updates on the Mac version on their website:
http://mac.utorrent.com/

 

The project was dead for awhile until someone decided to revive it. Porting uTorrent from Windows to Mac has been active recently as you can see from Beta testing and a link titled, "Coming soon for Mac!" on the download page.

 

I really like Transmission. It's maybe not as feature rich as uTorrent, but the developers are always busy improving it, and there is this real sense of "looking before they leap" when adding new features. It's just a solid app. I've never had it crash and burn on me. The competition should be interesting.

 

transmission also supports encryption...

 

really utorrent crashed on you? thats weird i have had my home desktop with utorrent continuously seeding for months and never had it crash. would be great if you ever got around to weeding the crap out of vuze, let us know if you do. i would say utorrent has the features you want from vuze with the lightweightness of transmission.

 

I recently switched to uTorrent on Vista because I was sick of Vuzes' Bloat. Honestly uTorrent is loaded by the time I finish clicking on the torrent to download. Vuze used to take up to 45 seconds to load into memory. With the hash encryption enabled, and the IPFilter.dat file set up in task manager to update once a week to load the latest block filters into it, I find uTorrent to be a much better, less resource intensive App than Vuze is.

They need to hurry up and release this for the Mac so all my friends can switch over.