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.

“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.

With uTP, uTorrent has become more ‘network aware’ as it will throttle itself if congestion is detected in the network. The uTorrent teams hopes this improvement will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle BitTorrent traffic, while its users should see less interference with other local applications and possibly faster downloads.

As advertised, uTP does indeed sound like a much-improved version of BitTorrent, but the reality is more nuanced. Over the past month there have been a lot of complaints from users who have seen their speeds decrease dramatically due to the implementation of the new protocol and not all developers are that exited either.

Increased overhead compared to the older protocol is cited as one of the reasons for the speed issues and some ‘fixes’ have been suggested on the uTorrent forums. There is a great upgrade guide submitted by community member Rafi which tries to solve these issues, but in the end uTorrent should address these concerns themselves. By default, uTP should perform equally well or better than its predecessor.

One of the steps to improve the implementation of uTP has been taken this week as BitTorrent Inc. decided to open source the code. By doing so they are inviting other BitTorrent developers to help improve uTP and to implement it into other BitTorrent clients to increase compatibility.

“uTP continues to evolve, and open sourcing the code will be essential in its continued development and adoption,” BitTorrent spokesperson Jenna Broughton told TorrentFreak in a comment. In response to the critique about slower speeds, Broughton adds that “BitTorrent has always believed that being transparent with users about technology and product developments is key.”

“uTP is a smart approach to managing network congestion, and we are encouraged by the early results we have seen from independent tests as well as our own, which indicate that uTP does not degrade download speeds and may indeed be faster,” Broughton adds, without going into detail on the speed issues that have been reported by many users in the forums.

One of the reasons uTP has been developed is to make traffic shaping and BitTorrent throttling by ISPs obsolete. Unfortunately there has not been any feedback from major ISPs on these issues, so the magnitude of uTP’s effect on their networks remain unknown.

“We have not received any formal feedback from ISPs. Informally, several technical insiders have confirmed a noticeable shift in traffic from TCP to uTP, and they seem generally positive about the deployment thus far. Universally, they commend the spirit of cooperation in helping manage congestion on the network,” Broughton told us.

Although it’s widely appreciated that uTP is now Open Source, developers of other clients are not all that eager to implement it yet. Vuze, one of uTorrent’s major competitors, told TorrentFreak that they will keep an eye on how it evolves before they make any decisions. Others have pointed out that uTP still has a long way to go before it becomes mainstream.

That said, there are bound to be issues when one is trying to innovate. There are still a lot of issues to be addressed with uTP, the most important being good speeds for everyone by default. The future will tell whether uTP is really the improvement BitTorrent Inc. claims it to be.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Together with Griffin and Pheon, the Falcon project is part of the recently announced uTorrent Labs. With Labs the development team is giving users early access to their latest projects, hoping to get useful feedback from the community.

The Falcon release is one of the main pillars for uTorrent’s future. Among other things, it allows users to access their downloads from anywhere through a secure web interface. Another new feature is that it allows users to stream videos so they can start watching before the download has fully finished,

The web interface of the Falcon project has been invite only since the start of the year, but today BitTorrent Inc. decided that the time was right to open it up to the public. Users can create an account and try it out, privacy and security guaranteed by BitTorrent Inc.

Aside from the features that are currently implemented, uTorrent has other big plans still in the pipeline for the new client and the web interface. Among other things, the Falcon release is expected to make it easier for users to find torrents.

The uTorrent team didn’t want to comment on how such torrent search capabilities will be integrated, but Simon Morris has stated that they are working on “better ability for torrent sites to promote content or search within the client.”

When we asked if this means that uTorrent will come with a built-in torrent search engine, Morris said that they are more interested in “APIs rather than bloating the uTorrent user experience.” We’ll see what this means in the months to come.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

On the development side the uTorrent team at BitTorrent Inc. hasn’t been sitting still either. Today they launch “uTorrent Apps”, an exciting new project that could be considered another milestone. With apps, users can easily install extensions and add custom features to uTorrent.

“Apps for µTorrent is a brand new web-based extensions framework that makes it easy for users to get more and do more with µTorrent without compromising the client’s renowned lightness and speed,” Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management says.

Similar to other apps, addons and extensions in today’s web browsers and phones, uTorrent apps will allow 3rd party developers to develop applications that will integrate seamlessly with the client. At launch there are already four free apps available, developed in cooperation with uTorrent.

Among the apps that are currently available are a free virus scanner for BitTorrent downloads and the µGadget which allows users to monitor and control torrent downloads more easily from a browser. VODO, the BitTorrent powered distribution platform for filmmakers that is supported by all the major torrent sites, also has an app already.

For developers who want to code uTorrent apps there will soon be an SDK available. “Apps are a new type of file with a .btapp suffix that consists entirely of HTML and Javascript and can be added to the client and displayed using an embedded browser window, so very little extra code is needed,” Morris explains.

The apps can be added to uTorrent from within the client and take just a click to install. We expect that most torrent sites will soon release their own apps to complement uTorrent. That’s just the start though, the possibilities are endless.

The uTorrent Griffin release is part of the new uTorrent labs section where the development team is giving users early access to their latest projects. Besides Griffin, the remote access project Falcon and the live streaming project Pheon are also listed.

We have already covered Falcon in the past. Besides secure remote access, this client also enables users to stream torrent video files files. Pheon is BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen’s pet project and is expected to be released later this year.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

Today, uTorrent version 2.0 was officially released. This new release is built to be more network friendly thanks to the Micro Transport Protocol (uTP) which aims to mitigate network congestion caused by poorly configured BitTorrent clients.

uTP is a new and improved implementation of the BitTorrent protocol which is designed to be more network friendly than its predecessor. The current implementation often causes interference with other applications. This is one of the main reasons why ISPs try to slow it down, or even stop it altogether. uTP aims to solve this problem.

Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management is quite proud of the end result, and told TorrentFreak that most ISPs have also responded positively to the implementation of the uTP protocol.

“In general the ISPs who we have explained the technology to have been quite pleasantly surprised. There are occasional noisy skeptics who think its something evil, but they are generally poor confused souls who are more interested in selling a centralized vision of the internet rather than the distributed egalitarian system we have today,” Morris said.

“I’m excited about uTP finally arriving at a full scale deployment on the internet and I really hope that ISPs take the time to understand the potential benefits to them before they take decisions about how to manage this new class of traffic on their networks,” he added.

Aside from being gentle to the ISP’s networks, uTorrent 2.0 might also have a beneficial effect on the download speeds of individual users. Since there is less congestion, uTorrent users will experience no slowdowns in web-browsing.

Less congestion and a more efficient use of the network may eventually result in faster download speeds, which means that it will be a win-win situation for both ISPs and uTorrent users.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.