Presenting Xtorrent: BitTorrent Done Right
With the RIAA suing grandparents and children every week and P2P apps gaining a reputation for carrying spyware and viruses, many people have been switching to BitTorrent over the past few years. Today, it's estimated that BitTorrent downloads are using over 30% of the internet's entire bandwidth and some people are even claiming that it is threatening net neutrality. I know they've been blaming my blog as well for tying up the internet, but I'll admit it, torrents are a little bit more popular than PhillRyu.com. 
The thing is, despite BitTorrent's popularity, torrent apps have always remained a bit hard to use unlike apps like Limewire, forcing users to wade through torrent trackers, find their file, make sure it has enough seeders, and then open the downloaded torrent file in their torrent app of choice to begin the download. Not the most user friendly process for us, uh, media enthusiasts.
That's why I was pretty excited to hear from my friend David Watanabe that his next app is fixing these problems once and for all. And, you guys, my readers, are the first to see what this solution is. It's called Xtorrent, and it's BitTorrent done right.
As you may or may not know, David is known best for Acquisition, the Limewire alternative with class. His experience in creating arguably the best P2P experience on any platform has paid off with Xtorrent. This is about as seamless of an experience as you could ask for. Search for files, double click, and bam, they begin to download. The only question I have is, why didn't anyone do this before??
Xtorrent works exactly as you'd expect. Type in a search term, and results show almost immediately, with easy iTunes-style filtering by type, list organization (I have it set to show the torrents with the highest number of seeders on top), and an iTunes Music Store "download" button which begins torrents immediately in the "Downloads" pane. There are, of course, no "Buy Video" buttons.
In addition, you'll notice some additional tabs for each search. These are web searches (defaulting to Google and Yahoo searches for your term + torrent) with one click torrent starting. The search engines are customizable through Xtorrent's preferences, so you can feel free to replace Google and Yahoo with your favorite torrent trackers.
Xtorrent's interface is heavily modeled off of Acquisition, and that's a good thing, as the Acquisition UI is a thing of beauty. In fact, its similarity with Acquisition may be my only complaint. Acquisition customers are going to ask why Xtorrent wasn't built-in. (Acquisition in fact already has rudimentary torrent support, just without the easy searching.) The only answer I can come up with is, Xtorrent on its own is going to get more attention than a new feature bullet for Acquisition would, and thus more customers. Plus, I suppose David has a history of creating small, focused apps that do one thing extremely well, and that holds with Xtorrent. Acquisition customers will have to suck it up though, because let's face it, you'll be saving a lot of wasted time with the app, and time is money right? (Plus, the app is sort of inherently valuable for what it does. You know what I mean.)
It's also worthy of note that the app sports a pretty slick icon by the talented Jasper Hauser. It's an icon that's reminiscent of some Apple pro application icons, which suits the Xtorrent experience just fine, to say the least.
David should have a public beta up within a week or two, so keep your eyes peeled at XtorrentP2P.com. (And I'll post news of it as well.) And I hope you guys enjoyed this preview, because this ain't the last of them. There are some really cool OS X apps in the pipeline. 
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Comments
Up until this point, there have been 76 responses to “Presenting Xtorrent: BitTorrent Done Right”:
This looks stunning, I cant wait!
Can't wait to get my hands on this app.!
I hope he's not stealing GPL-licensed code again, though.
Any word on XTorrent being donationware like Acquisition?
let me guess he'll charge a huge amount for it...
Hrm, we'll wait and see how this stacks up to the competition. Azureus + plugins just rubs me the right way.
Never had much use for Acquisition, though there's no denying its inherent quality of design and functionality. In fact it's those very things that led me to choose NewsFire over the other best-of-breed feed reader for OS X.
XTorrent looks promising and is definitely an app I could find some regular use for. Love the icon, but while I think it's far better than the one for NewsFire, it doesn't have quite the same feel to it as Acquisition's. Hate to use the word, but it almost feels generic (which is not a comment on the awesome word that Hauser does).
All in all, looks good and thanks for the heads up.
No offense to any one of the guys involved in this project but I got so sick of Torrent's slow speeds and have completely swapped my P2P downloading over to Usenet. Always fast and reliable--THAT is the way P2P should be.
Best of luck to Dave with his new app though, he has always made some of the best damn UI's out there.
You know what bit torrent done right is: a good, free bit torrent client with plugin support. Thats all it takes people, if you have plugin support you can add in all the useless features you want and its not gonna cost a rediculas amount like this app (probably) will.
I still think that this should just be a part of Acquisition. It still would be a focused app, doing one thing and doing it well, that would be... "downloading files."
I think I'll stick with Transmission on this one.
I hate the bigger torrent apps (Azureus uck) so I'll probably stick with Tomato Torrent and Transmission.
Looks very interesting, though a bit bulky for a torrent app. I like Transmission and use it now, but when it is released I'll give it for a test drive..
I own both Acquisition and Panic's Unison. After trying them out for about three months, I decided that BitTorrent is still the way to go, froze my Unison membership, and never looked back. There is no point in saying BitTorrent speeds are slow, if you know what you are doing, BT is the best download method available.
Xtorrent is indeed exciting, but as stated before in the comments, if it doesn't have encryption support, then it won't (and shouldn't) be used - because the availability of this feature affects everyone. And I also believe making it a part of Acquisition (or free for Acquisition users) would be the right thing to do.
Well, actually the right thing to do would be to make it open source, but I doubt that will happen.
I hope that this will save us from Azureus, the ugliest, most sluggish application available for OS X!
Watanabe makes some of the best UI's out there, I think more dev's should be following his lead.
I prefere the "one fuction doin' it good" approach, it lends itself to a tighter sturdier app.
It looks like this will be able to download specific files from a torrent. I hope so, because ill be the first to jump onboard if it does.
You've been dugg to the front page.
I prefer Limewire to Acquisition. I've coresponded with Dvaid and he doesn't feel the inclusion of random ports (like Limewire) is worth doing as he believe it will confuse users. He might be right, and in the long term it may do little to evade traffic shaping, but in the short term random pots and traffic encryption seem like "must haves" for for any P2P application.
Far as I can tell the only advantage that this program has over any other torrent client is.
1) It has some type of basic search.
2) It looks like a mac application.
If you want torrent search use.
torrent haarvester
http://torrentharvester.awardspace.com/
Its not a torrent client but what it does is search a large group of torrent sites for the file your looking for.
This looks awesome, and I will definately download it as soon as it hits the net. The big thing that will decide if I'm gonna use it is, like many other already have said, the support for encrypted connections. I use Oink.me.uk a lot and they only allow a certain kind of torrent-apps. Sure hope this will too
Phill, can you ask David if XTorrent is gonna support encrypted connections for us? Please?
Im looking forward to this one for sure.
XTorrent. F YEAH. Seriously, this is great. I love Acquisition for torrents, and this makes it even better. I will buy it for sure.
UI looks stunning! And badly needed too! Posted article at howtohut
http://www.howtohut.com/presenting_xtorrent_bittorrent_done_right
This would go good with tvRSS!
http://tvrss.net/search/?show_name=%@
Can anyone verify if the above URL works? If not, please contact me at support (at) tvrss (dot) net if it doesn't and I will do what I can to make support for it.
Anyone useing Limewire on OSX? After seeing it run on a PC I'm terrified of it. This is a stupid question, but is it even likely that a Mac would get spyware from an app such as Limewire?
Unless it has individual file selection and encription then I'm not going anywhere near it.
Looks pretty slick. Can't wait for this one to come out.
Does it support single file download from a torrent with multiple files? That is what is missing in Transmission. Let's see how good it is compared to µtorrent on PC.
Of course no credit given to libtorrent...
@ Rich
Yeah, charging money for your product, that's just horrible!
Yeah, after thinking this over, it should be part of Acquisition. I own both Inquisitior and NewsFire and love them both. I have been considering buying Acquisition for a while, and as of right now, I use it entirely for torrents, but the P2P aspect is nice to have. It's how I get all my obscure techno. Long story short, I don't want to fork out money for both Acquisition and XTorrent, when I could simply buy Acquisition, which already does torrents anyways.
Here is my concern: Dave, don't take torrent support out of Acquisition. Please. Put XTorrent into Acquisition, and raise it's price a bit. That would be a hot app.
I look forward to trying this application. Thank you for the preview!
I do hope, however, that this application will be free or open source! ;P
In response to why hasn't anyone done this before ... it's because it's very sketchy in the legal arena, and pretty easy to stop if the right people take notice, sorry ; )
[...] I stumbled upon some prerelease screenshots of xTorrent over at phillryu. It is unsure if the application will be free, and if not, how much it will cost. But there’s no doubt that it looks great. [...]
Phil, thanks for this excellent write up! I was cuising digg when I saw this link. I will spread the word!
Wow. *Another* application from David that sole reason for existence is commit copyright infringement (with the very odd real life use. I mean when was the last time you really downloaded legal content in a torrent?) And this is just a guess, But I think hes going to charge for it . So, another app that is used to steal money from other peoples pockets (so the record and movie industries say) and hes making money off it. Why is the RIAA suing me? David already has my money, hes getting rich off me breaking the law, sue him! I wonder what open source code will be at the core of xtorrent?
There are already goodloocking and easy to use clients. It all boils down to features. Will Xtorrent have,
- Encryption? Its really needed nowadays when stupid ISPs starts to block torrent traffic, even if its legal traffic.
- Download single file from multifile torrent? If a torrent has 10 files, and I only have one of them, I shouldnt need to download all 10 files.
- Follow the standards? I used Transmission before, but thanks to the stupid coder and his ideas Transmission is now banned from OINK.
First GPL code in Acquisition which he uses dodgy loopholes for then GPL code in Xtorrent (libtorrent). Nice.
[...] David Watanabe - автор Inquisitor, NewsFire и Acquisition - все они прочно заняли место в моем списке must have. Отличительной особенностью программного обеспечения by David Watanabe является элегантный минимализм. Я особенно придирчив к оформлению и юзабилити интерфейса пользователя. Так вот к вышеперечисленным программам у меня претензий нет. Судя по скриншотам - интерфейс XTorrent нареканий не вызывает. На офф сайте пока нет информации о XTorrent. У Phill Ruy есть краткое описание и пара скринов. [...]
I agree, this is a beautiful app... closest to it is Transmission. But I would like to see how powerful it is as well! I agree with Paul Stamatiou on this.
Also, as Joe said above, I'm sure this is going to charged. Why would you buy this, when there are good alternatives for free out there?! Make it free and we'll love David Watanabe!
[...] so David Watanabe has created this, xTorrent (for OS X). Check out Phil Ryu’s website for more details [...]
I wonder who Mr. Watanabe will steal source code from for this application...
This looks awesome, and I will definately download it as soon as it hits the net. The big thing that will decide if I'm gonna use it is, like many other already have said, the support for encrypted connections. I use Oink a lot and they only allow a certain kind of torrent-apps. Sure hope this will work with Oionk.
Phill, can you ask David if XTorrent is gonna support encrypted connections for us? Please?
Im looking forward to this one for sure.
Well... We already have a couple of Cocoa BitTorrent apps. How about ed2k?
In other news, your friends at steel skies recently sold their Cover Floew technology to Apple, and it's awesomely incorporated into iTunes!
Great to Apple buying awesome third-company apps, rtaher than stelaing them.
This looks interesting. Thanx phil
[...] Ya ha habido las primeras pruebas que han dejado muy buen sabor de boca a Philip Ryu, que lo expone en el extendido y nutrido post que os enlazo, dónde enseña las principales virtudes de la aplicación, tales como el motor de búsquedas (que permite incluir nuestros buscadores de torrent favoritos sin mucha dificultad) o la cuidada interfaz de descarga que presentará el programa. [...]
For everyone under the impression that David is a thief take a look over here:
He might be a bit of a jerk but he is no a thief.
Great, just great. Stick up for a guy and he stabs you in the back.
Just did a fresh install of tiger on my new hard drive and it would not accept my email for the registration! Tried moving over all the usual files. Still nothing.
Don't I feel like a fool.
Looks like I won't be buying Xtorrent after all. Shame, it looks like a fantastic app.
Hopefully it turns up on some of those "media enthusiast" sites.
Dylan C.
That is only the code for the Limewire code. According to the GPL *ALL* code must be released and Mr. Watanabe has not released the code for the rest of the application including the user interface.
does it support piracy ? Will it download the winners MydreamApp? ! Boy HowdyThats going be cool! not for you though..
What is this? Is this a joke?
Please please make this a freeware (and without the nags that acquisition has)....
nice find!
t'would appear that "bittorrent done right" is transmission with a new gui. or thats what it announces as anyway
We were all wrong. He's not using libtorrent, instead hes chosen to use libtransmission because of its liberal license. Now he can sell his application without even have to pretend hes following the core's license.
Public Beta available for download...Can't wait to get my hands on it...
David Watanabe - Once again, making pirating easier and prettier.
I hope you feel good about yourself.
Come on dude, makes this (And Acquisition) freeware.
Paying for an application you use to download stuff without paying? please.
It's a great application- too bad I won't be using it if you have to pay for it.
Also yeah, it needs a lot more features that are common sense before i wipe every other torrent app from here, but for a beta it's pretty good.
[...] Just a week after my preview, Dave Watanabe's Xtorrent is now available publicly in public beta form. The build will expire when the beta testing period is over, and you can read some release notes on Dave's blog. Enjoy everyone, this is a pretty awesome app! your ad here [...]
any word on whether he's going to fix the libtransmission announce interval/ratio issues so that xtorrent will be allowed on private trackers?
its kind of funny that it's going to be a paid app which you can use to not pay for itself.
[...] Xtorrent: BitTorrent Done Right (tags: software) [...]
Whats the point of paying for piracy? Pirating stuff off evil music corporaitions is good, but paying for the tools just goes against he whole ethics of it.
I say someone should crack it then release the cracked app on bitorent.
hey guys, also try Transmission - the lightest BT client for Mac OS X out there .. really worth giving it a go !
[...] Then Monday I read on Phill Ryu’s blog about an upcoming BT client known as XTorrent. It’s being developed by the guy that made Acquisition (an alternative to Limewire for P2P filesharing) and the screenshots Phill has up look great (and quite similar to BitRocket, interestingly enough). It seems he’s shooting for a public release in the next few weeks, so I’m looking forward to seeing where the client stands at that point. [...]
[...] my favorite torrent software to date. easy to use, FAST DOWNLOADS, and great search feature!!!! read more | digg story Filed under: News | [...]
Grazie
[...] Finally, a torrent app that’s super easy to use. Search for files, click download, and bam, they begin downloading, all contained in a super slick Aqua UI. By the guy who made Acquisition and Newsfire.read more | digg story [...]
Phil, you of all people should know how much of a dodgy schmuck Dave Watanabe is. Yet, you right praise for his apps. His apps steal source code from other apps. GPL'd apps, no less. And then he charges for them. Not to mention the myriad of complaints all over the net of people who paid for the app, never received reg codes, can't upgrade, have had posts on Watanabe's forum deleted by Watanabe because of his lacksidasical idea of customer support...
Don't support this thief. He's just as bad as any codewhore at Redmond's great company.
Laughing Man: You're absolutely right. Dave Watanabe is a jackass and by all appearances, Phill Ryu is either in denial or on the take.
Marvelous. Thanks, will spread this among my friends!
Well it is now 4 months later and this program shows no signs of becoming compliant. It will give you unrealistic share ratios. One member of a tracked member site I use had a user with 26,000+gig downloaded(definition of unrealistic)
This program also shows no signs of single file download which is a must for me.
If he is willing to fix this I still would not be able to buy it as I use my schools T1 connection to share Linux distros. 4gig USB memory sticks rock.
hi there, everything that was said in this blog about xtorrent was true until the last upgrade. before it, the application was superfast and reliable, i could use it working in the background without any noticeable performance reduction in the macbook pro 2.2 i use. but since upgrading to xtorrent 1.0 (b.40) the computer is barely usable when xtorrent is running.
XTorrent is based off the MIT-LICENSED OPEN SOURCE client Transmission. Don't pay for it! A lot of hard work was put into the app - and not by Dave!
I use xtorrent all the time. It's top class!
I upgraded no problem. Excellent software! I keep expecting a catch!
where can I get the key to unlock a download, I'm told to go to xtorrent.biz but there is no page
I have xtorrent but cant figure out how to burn files to disk. Can anyone help please.
password please for the new harry potter. thank you.
Taken from the OiNK Bittorrent Clients Allowed/Disallowed List:
[quote][b]Xtorrent –[/b] based on old, buggy Transmission code, not free (!?)[/quote]
Torrentfreak's review of Xtorrent:
[quote]The first major drawback of Xtorrent is that it is not free, which is extremely unusual and awkward for a BitTorrent client. In addition, Xtorrent has a very intrusive shareware policy. If you do not register the application, a floating window that you cannot close gets stuck on your screen, and searches randomly start to fail. To make things even worse, it seems like the application throttles the available bandwidth to 10kbps after an hour of usage.
The second drawback is that Xtorrent’s core is made up of the libtransmission library. This library is known to hammer trackers, and is banned from an increasing number of them, which makes Xtorrent useless for members of Oink, for example.
If you decide to buy Xtorrent you’re mostly paying for the (stunningly) beautiful user-interface, not because its download speeds are the best or because it is the lightest BitTorrent client available for the Mac. Azureus still leads by a wide margin in download speeds, and Transmission is hands down the lightest BitTorrent client for the Mac.
Xtorrent looks good, it integrates well with iTunes, has iPod support and subscribes to RSS feeds. But to be completely honest, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth the money.[/quote]
Yes, it has a pretty interface, but it's an awful program, and it's $24 overpriced. Why would anyone pay money for a bad Torrent client when there are already a ton of much better alternatives available – for free!? I bought an Acquisition license in the past, but what Mr. Watanabe has done with Xtorrent really makes me question whether I'd continue to support him in the future.
Tom
September 11th, 2006 at 3:33pmDoes it support encryption? I'd love to quit using the memory hog that Azureus is, but it's hard to do that until another OS X Torrent client supports encrypted connections. I just can't have the Internet police peeking in on my latest Ubuntu downloads.