Mat Harvard

BitTorrent, one of the most important inventions these days. It's the current best way to transfer any large file, or virtually any file. Though a lot of controversy exists as to which files are being transferred, however, that is something I won't get in to. BitTorrent is typically accessible through a client, many such clients exist, for example uTorrent, Vuze (previously Azureus) or even BitTorrent itself. I've been through a number of clients on different operating systems.

Azureus (now called “Vuze”)

I was inducted into the torrent world at a young age, at the time I knew absolutely nothing about what it was, or how it worked. It was just a faster way of downloading the latest version of Ubuntu. Back then I was running Windows XP (still my favourite version of Windows), and using a client recommended to me by a friend called, “Azureus”. It was pretty neat, lots of lines with blocks moving towards circles and dotted boxes with many shades of blue! Definitely a solid client that I'd recommend to anyone at the time. One day it upped and called itself “Vuze”, added a bunch of useless junk, advertisements, most horrible navigation, slightly nicer UI, and tried to be the all-in-one media client. Luckily for me, at about that time I switched to a Mac.

So on my fancy iMac with Mac OS X Tiger, I attempt to use Vuze, since it was multi-platform, and I had no idea about any Mac applications for torrent files. Let's just say it didn't last too long, and was in my Trash bin pretty quick.

Xtorrent

After a bit of searching, I found what was to be my torrent client for the next two years. It was Xtorrent, a Mac only torrent client. It worked great, and the search feature was amazingly good. Xtorrent lasted me through Tiger and Leopard; an iMac, a MacBook, and a MacBook Pro. Issues started to arise around late Leopard/Snow Leopard time. It routinely crashed for unknown reasons. Even when it was sitting idle, or downloading with no interaction on my part. Like NewsFire, I persevered hoping it would get better in time, but it didn't, at least not soon enough.

uTorrent

Most definitely the best torrent client on Windows made its debut on Mac OS X. It had its quirks and downsides, but overall it was great (and never crashed!). For months it was my client of choice, but there was one issue that always bugged me. Now here's where you get to call me a snob! The UI in uTorrent was dismal. And for that reason alone, I went looking for what was to become my new favourite torrent client.

Transmission

I'd heard about Transmission before, but never thought to try it. After a discussion with my friend Richard Neary about possible options other than Xtorrent, he whole heartedly recommended Transmission. After my first download, I was sold (oh did I mention it's free?). The UI was minimal yet extremely functional, it offered all the features I was looking for and more (more being a web interface). It's never crashed on me, and I have a feeling that it never well (it's a Mac thing, we've got this sixth-sense going on that tells us if an app is going to crash, aka. spinning beach ball). Transmission is and will be in the foreseeable future my torrent client of choice.