Fine Mac Software: Xtorrent // writing
It seems that David Watanabe has been busy squirrelling away in his lab and is releasing a point update to his fabulous Xtorrent application.
When I first landed on the Mac platform a few years back, if you wanted to download via torrents, you had little choice. I ended up using the bloated java torrent client Azureus. It used to regularly drag my poor G4 iMac to its knees. So, I stopped using the torrent download links you see about the place, and went back to downloading large files using the browser. Not a pleasant experience.
We’re four years on from those dark days and in the last 18 months, I’ve been a user of Xtorrent, it’s simply terrific. Elegant, ‘mac-like’ and fast and without bringing my Mac to tiny electronic tears.
If there has been one thing it’s been missing it has been the selection of individual files within a torrent, and now we’re at 1.1 we’re golden as far as that is concerned.
I’ve happily put my money where my mouth is and handed over my paltry US$24. I realise there are free alternatives, but for the price of a few pints, I’d rather have exceptionally professional software from an independent developer who really cares about his interface design.
Plus keeping a one-man show, like Watanabe, in the software game gives me a warm feeling inside. Lets not even get started on how fantastic his RSS caresser, Newsfire is. (Let’s have synchronisation with GReader in version 2 Dave – I know you can do it!)
This is the first of an irregular series on useful software, that I can’t live without. Watch out for more.