uTorrent App files have a .btapp suffix and consist entirely of HTML and Javascript. The Apps can be added to the client with a single click and are displayed using an embedded browser window.

Similar to other apps, addons and extensions in today’s web browsers and phones, uTorrent Apps will allow 3rd party developers to create applications that will integrate seamlessly with the client.

Initially only a handful of Apps were included with the experimental ‘Griffin‘ client. This project merged with the latest uTorrent 3.0 alpha release last week and today BitTorrent Inc. made an SDK available that developers can use to code their own Apps.

“Apps for uTorrent is something that we are really passionate about. For us, it is a natural and important evolution of uTorrent,” says Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management. “It is a way for users to create a personalized experience by adding Apps that offer new features and services that are important to them – without compromising the lightness that they have come to love with uTorrent.”

“Another important component of Apps for uTorrent is the developer community. Apps that inspire new and innovative uses of uTorrent – built by developers – are an important part of our vision.”

To stimulate the development of uTorrent Apps, BitTorrent Inc. is also starting a developers challenge, awarding a $1000 prize to the best App to be submitted during the coming month. With the challenge they hope to encourage developers worldwide to create Apps that will highlight new use cases and redefine how uTorrent is being used.

The Apps bundled with the latest release of uTorrent 3.0 are far from groundbreaking, so it will be interesting to see what creative implementations other developers come up with.

Entries to the Apps developer challenge will be judged based on originality and innovation, quality of product, product or service appeal and technical expertise. The contest closes on Friday, August 13, 2010.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The Griffin branch of uTorrent adds Apps for uTorrent support, allowing users to easily install extensions and add custom features. The Falcon project enables users to stream torrent video files and access their client remotely through a secure web-interface.

After having tested the two projects in the wild for a few months, the uTorrent team has now decided to integrate both projects into the alpha release of uTorrent 3.0. With this latest release uTorrent literally takes a giant leap from version 2.1 to 3.0, marking the significance of the fuller featured client.

Aside from merging the two experimental projects, the latest alpha of uTorrent has patched a major security flaw through which VPN users could have their real IP-address exposed. By default, uTorrent has disabled IPv6 which causes this vulnerability, while adding an option in the advanced settings to enable it for those who don’t use a VPN.

Together with the new 3.0 alpha, uTorrent has released several new Apps including µBrowse. “As before, all Apps are completely optional, so you can choose to add only the ones you like in order to keep your client as lightweight as possible,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management commented.

The uTorrent Apps specification is expected to be opened up to the public soon, so third party developers can create their own Apps for the client. Among other things this will allow torrent site operators to embed their website’s search functionality in uTorrent.

Although the new features in uTorrent 3.0 are for Windows users only, progress has been steady on the Mac side as well. After several years of development, a stable version of the Mac client finally came out two weeks ago. The Linux version of uTorrent is still a work in progress and will be released later this summer.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The goal of the trial is to assess the demand for downloadable content and whether it’s possible to effectively reduce the bandwidth costs of the streaming platform currently in use. The decision to use BitTorrent, the most efficient P2P protocol, was an easy one.

Through the current platform NPO streams are watched more than 13 million times per month. With the BitTorrent-powered streams, users will offer their own bandwidth which means that streaming costs could go down drastically.

NPO has partnered on the project with the Dutch company Bitnomica, who use the Open Source Swarmplayer software developed at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands. Due to rights issues, viewers have to use a special player through which the files will be viewable for 10 days after the initial broadcast. They can download the .tstream files with most of the regular BitTorrent clients, but the player seems to work best.

Currently, only a few hundred recent videos are available, but a back-catalogue of tens of thousands could be added if the half-year trial turns out to be a success. During the trial NPO aims to put as much fresh content on BitTorrent as possible, with daily updates of all the latest video broadcasts.

Although NPO is the first major TV broadcaster to widely adopt BitTorrent, there have been others who’ve made videos available this way. Norwegian public broadcasting organization (NRK) has previously set up its very own BitTorrent tracker to distribute several of their TV-shows, DRM free. In Canada, public television broadcaster CBC used BitTorrent to distribute one of its TV-shows after they ran into distribution problems.

If successful, this trial could be a major breakthrough for BitTorrent-powered streaming as it might convince other parties to try it out and get a taste of the future of web-based video delivery. In the UK the BBC has been eager to adopt BitTorrent as well. They did a trial earlier this year but thus far rights issues have contributed in holding back a roll-out on a wider scale.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

The goal of the trial is to assess the demand for downloadable content and whether it’s possible to effectively reduce the bandwidth costs of the streaming platform currently in use. The decision to use BitTorrent, the most efficient P2P protocol, was an easy one.

Through the current platform NPO streams are watched more than 13 million times per month. With the BitTorrent-powered streams, users will offer their own bandwidth which means that streaming costs could go down drastically.

NPO has partnered on the project with the Dutch company Bitnomica, who use the Open Source Swarmplayer software developed at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands. Due to rights issues, viewers can’t download or stream the videos with their regular BitTorrent clients. They’ll have to use a special player through which the files will be viewable for 10 days after the initial broadcast.

Currently, only a few hundred recent videos are available, but a back-catalogue of tens of thousands could be added if the half-year trial turns out to be a success. During the trial NPO aims to put as much fresh content on BitTorrent as possible, with daily updates of all the latest video broadcasts.

Although NPO is the first major TV broadcaster to widely adopt BitTorrent, there have been others who’ve made videos available this way. Norwegian public broadcasting organization (NRK) has previously set up its very own BitTorrent tracker to distribute several of their TV-shows, DRM free. In Canada, public television broadcaster CBC used BitTorrent to distribute one of its TV-shows after they ran into distribution problems.

If successful, this trial could be a major breakthrough for BitTorrent-powered streaming as it might convince other parties to try it out and get a taste of the future of web-based video delivery. In the UK the BBC has been eager to adopt BitTorrent as well. They did a trial earlier this year but thus far rights issues have contributed in holding back a roll-out on a wider scale.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Transmission became the default BitTorrent client on various Linux distributions including Ubuntu, and it is also one of the most-used Mac BitTorrent clients.

This week Transmission’s development reached an important milestone as the stable version of Transmission 2.0 was released. Transmission, often praised by its users for being full-featured but lightweight, has geared up for the increasing demands of BitTorrent users today.

TorrentFreak spoke with Transmission developer Charles Kerr who walked us through some of the most notable improvements in the latest Transmission release.

“Transmission 2.0′s code is faster and smarter,” Charles Kerr said. “We’ve profiled the code for CPU bottlenecks and removed them. Startup, peer management, blocklists, and verifying local data are all faster. Transmission 2.0 is also smarter about detecting and handling network lag.”

“For 24/7 remote seedboxes, headless systems, and embedded systems, we’ve made Transmission-daemon easier to build, added hooks for scripting, and shrunk the memory footprint. Transmission-daemon has one of the smallest footprints — if not the smallest — of any BitTorrent client.”

Transmission takes pride in being volunteer-based and non-commercial, unlike bigger clients such as uTorrent, Vuze, and BitComet. Charles told TorrentFreak that this also comes with a downside, because future development relies on its community of volunteers.

“It means development happens only when volunteers are available,” he said. “For example, if any of your readers are Windows or ExtJS programmers who want to work on the Windows or Web clients, the Transmission team would like to hear from them.”

Indeed, you’re reading it right, a native Windows application is a serious option if there are skilled volunteers available. For now, however, Transmission’s expansion possibilities are limited to the other platforms while it has to settle for the title of the most-used BitTorrent client without a Windows version.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

“In our ever-connected world, users want the ability to control their torrents on the go anytime, anywhere. So, in a continued effort to make our products more accessible we are introducing µTorrent Web for iPhone,” says Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management.

“While µTorrent Web is currently only available as part of our experimental Project Falcon software, we continue to fill out the feature set prior to a large-scale rollout,”
Morris added in a recent blog post. Although we haven’t been able to confirm it, we assume that uTorrent web is supported on the iPad as well.

The Falcon release of uTorrent is key component of the client’s future. It is very similar to the standard uTorrent application but has several added features including support for the web interface and video streaming. Together with Griffin and Pheon, the Falcon project is part of the recently announced uTorrent Labs which give users early access to beta projects.

In order to use the web interface at web.utorrent.com users will have to download and install the latest Falcon release. After an encryption swipe and logging in, users will see the iPhone compatible interface that gives them all the controls they are familiar with in their regular PC client.

For those wondering why there are no BitTorrent-related apps in the App Store, it is because Apple notoriously bans all applications that have anything to do with BitTorrent. “Because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights. We have chosen to not publish this type of application to the App Store,” is Apple’s official explanation.

Despite its desire to control every aspect of its business, Apple is not censoring the websites that people access on their phones just yet, so the uTorrent web-interface can be reached through the Safari browser. Fingers crossed.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Ever since uTorrent was released, Mac and Linux users have begged the developers to release a version of the client designed to work on their computers. In 2006, when uTorrent was sold to BitTorrent Inc., the company announced that a Mac version was coming. In 2008, nearly two years after the announcement, it was finally released to the public.

With the the release of the Mac version, Linux users were the only ones left out in the cold, but this is about to change. The uTorrent development team has just announced that they are working on a Linux version of the client. Further details on the time line and an eventual release date are not available at the moment.

The Linux version is the most backed idea on uTorrent’s recently introduced Idea Bank. The Idea Bank is prominently featured on uTorrent’s website and allows users to submit and vote for ideas they want to see implemented. In just a few weeks the idea of a Linux version has been supported by 3254 people. This huge demand from users is one of the main reasons why the Linux version is now in progress.

“Since launching our Idea Bank on uTorrent.com there has been significant demand for a native client for Linux,” BitTorrent Inc. spokesperson Jenna Broughton told TorrentFreak. “We obviously want to do our best to deliver whenever we see a good fit between our goals and capabilities and what our users say they want.”

“We are committed to bringing a lightweight uTorrent client that embraces the usability and features of our Windows and Mac clients to Linux users,” Broughton said. The exact feature-set of the Linux client will remain a secret for now, but in common with other versions of uTorrent it wont be Open Source.

The release date for the client is unknown at this point but unlike the Mac version it should come out relatively quickly. “While the exact specs as well as the timing are still being developed, we expect uTorrent for Linux to be available for download later this summer,” we were informed.

Whether or not the uTorrent Linux release will ever reach the massive market share it has on Windows remains to be seen. The Mac version has been well received but it is by no means the most used BitTorrent client on the platform. Whatever happens, it’s definitely good to see that uTorrent will soon be available on all three major platforms.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

One of the novelties in the new uTorrent release was uTP, a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be network friendly. Critics, however, have labeled the new release as unfair, which has resulted in the client being banned from several private BitTorrent trackers.

The critique was aimed at the new uTP protocol which causes uTorrent to favor its own kind when networking. This means that when connecting to other clients, uTorrent users will give preference to other uTorrent users.

Earlier this week BitTorrent Inc., the company behind uTorrent, open sourced the uTP protocol so other developers can make their clients uTorrent compatible. Although not all developers are equally excited about uTP, Ktorrent has already upgraded its client to support uTP with its new 4.0 release.

To our knowledge, KTorrent is the first client outside BitTorrent Inc. to implement uTP support. With uTP, KTorrent will be more network aware as it will throttle itself if congestion is detected in the network. In theory, this should eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic, while KTorrent users should see less interference with other local applications.

Aside from adding uTP support the latest KTorrent release also adds support for magnet links, a feature that was pushed by The Pirate Bay and has now been implemented by all the prominent BitTorrent clients. The full KTorrent changelog can be found at the official website.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

One of the novelties in the new uTorrent release was uTP, a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be network friendly. Critics, however, have labeled the new release as unfair, which has resulted in the client being banned from several private BitTorrent trackers.

The critique was aimed at the new uTP protocol which causes uTorrent to favor its own kind when networking. This means that when connecting to other clients, uTorrent users will give preference to other uTorrent users.

Earlier this week BitTorrent Inc., the company behind uTorrent, open sourced the uTP protocol so other developers can make their clients uTorrent compatible. Although not all developers are equally excited about uTP, Ktorrent has already upgraded its client to support uTP with its new 4.0 release.

“Several KTorrent users asked for it, and it seemed like an interesting feature to add,” KTorrent developer Joris Guisson told TorrentFreak in a comment.

To our knowledge, KTorrent is the first client outside BitTorrent Inc. to implement uTP support. With uTP, KTorrent will be more network aware as it will throttle itself if congestion is detected in the network. In theory, this should eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic, while KTorrent users should see less interference with other local applications.

Aside from adding uTP support the latest KTorrent release also adds support for magnet links, a feature that was pushed by The Pirate Bay and has now been implemented by all the prominent BitTorrent clients. The full KTorrent changelog can be found at the official website.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

With more than 100 million downloads of the application since 2007, Vuze is one of the most recognized BitTorrent brands. The client is used by millions of people each day which makes it the second most-used BitTorrent client in the western world after uTorrent.

In recent years, Vuze has turned away from being just a download client by including several new features. One of the additions made in late 2008 is a search feature that returns results from torrent sites within the application itself, so users don’t have to use their web browser.

This search feature has been well received and is widely used by Vuze users. “The Vuze community conducts over 50 million searches per month, a monthly number that continues to grow by over 5% every month,” Vuze’s Director of Marketing Chris Thun told TorrentFreak.

These searches are a significant traffic source for supported BitTorrent clients. KickassTorrents, one of the most recent additions to Vuze’s search engines reported a huge traffic spike thanks to Vuze. After it was included, the site received an additional 100,000 unique visits a day.

In addition to search, Vuze’s device integration with iTunes, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PSP and TiVo is also appreciated by users. More than 100 million videos have been transferred by Vuze users to these devices in the last year.

Focusing on more that just downloads has been a concious choice for the Vuze team. “The risk is that BitTorrent software will eventually hit a wall if the competitive field narrowly focuses on downloading, and fails to solve some of the basic usability walls that currently exist in many of the major clients,” Thun told us.

“BitTorrent users increasingly want the ability to easily find, download, and play content available across the web. Vuze has focused significant effort on filling a few key holes in this broader use case,” he explained to TorrentFreak.

It is good to see BitTorrent clients becoming more user centric as they continue to evolve, something that’s much needed in the competitive field.

Disclaimer: Vuze is one of TorrentFreak’s sponsors.

Article from: TorrentFreak.