[voodoo]

http://www.bitsonwheels.com/

I just came across this client, it is still in development but is quite usable in the current beta form. It is written 100% in Obj-C/Cocoa and is freeware (so far). It has many of the advanced features of Azureus but none of the Java crap that one has to endure with Azureus.

It is far simpler than Az, but far more advanced than the official BitTorrent client and TomatoTorrent. Anyway, go ahead and try it - I think it is great to have alternatives and am looking forward to the final release of Bits on Wheels.

Some screenshots (kinda big so just links for u)

3D swarm feature - cool in a nerdy kinda way

General status view

Pieces view

---

V

[forkies]

looks pretty sweet. the 3d swarm graph is mesmerizing.

[Twilly Spree]

Wow it alway amazes me how things can be made cool on the Mac. This is a pretty darn fine app.

[Millennium]

Are you sure that this is a Cocoa app? Not that Cocoa has any meaning whatsoever except in the eyes of zealots, but this app doesn't live up to Cocoa's reputation for somehow magically making an app good. It doesn't even have a proper Cocoa toolbar.

The 3-D swarm view looks to only be useful when the swarm is very small; otherwise it gets too cluttered. Of course, if the swarm is very small, then something is wrong, because the BitTorrent protocol was designed to work with large swarms.

Azureus is still more powerful, and -surprisingly- it still has a better interface. Give this new app some time and it may become a decent competitor, but Azureus is still far and away the best BitTorrent client app on the Mac for anything more than the casual user, and still arguably the best for anyone else. All this app does is give those who aren't Cocoa zealots more ammunition that a Cocoa app is not intrinsically better or worse than any other kind of application.

[Dog Like Nature]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Are you sure that this is a Cocoa app?

Well, the author claims it is, and he/she should know, right?

[Thinine]

I tried it out a few weeks ago. It has much less CPU usage than the official client, and a lot of the same features as Azureus, but it quite slow when downloading (low download rates), at least compared to the official client. It's also a RAM hog (36MB real memory usage, at the minimum) and like Millennium said, it doesn't have that great of an interface.

[Twilly Spree]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Are you sure that this is a Cocoa app? Not that Cocoa has any meaning whatsoever except in the eyes of zealots, but this app doesn't live up to Cocoa's reputation for somehow magically making an app good. It doesn't even have a proper Cocoa toolbar.

The 3-D swarm view looks to only be useful when the swarm is very small; otherwise it gets too cluttered. Of course, if the swarm is very small, then something is wrong, because the BitTorrent protocol was designed to work with large swarms.

Azureus is still more powerful, and -surprisingly- it still has a better interface. Give this new app some time and it may become a decent competitor, but Azureus is still far and away the best BitTorrent client app on the Mac for anything more than the casual user, and still arguably the best for anyone else. All this app does is give those who aren't Cocoa zealots more ammunition that a Cocoa app is not intrinsically better or worse than any other kind of application.

Yes I'm sure this is a cocoa app in the same way I'm sure Photoshop is a carbon app.. because the AUTHOR says so.

In any case: Please, stop with the cocoa vs carbon vs whatever zealotry. You seem to be the the only one here acting like a zealot in the area bringing it up in the first place. You may have noticed you are the very first one to even touch upon the subject of "what is so great about cocoa anyway you zealots??!!"

The point is that this app is cocoa vs the alternative: java. There is not a SINGLE carbon BitTorrent app in existance so there isn't really a comparison anyway. Many are using the official BitTorrent client because it is lean and light both in operation and on resources. Azureus is a fine enough app but ultimately it is the resource hog of death�. BoW seems to be a compromise between the features of Az and simplicity of BitTorrent.

This app is magically better than Azureus in 2 major ways and both because it is a cocoa app as opposed to java.

1. It is a zillion times (YMMV) faster and hogs less resources compared to Az
2. Its interface is a darn sight better and clearer than Az

The 3D swarm is good for getting a quick visual glance at how your torrent is going. That's it. Most torrents connect to 25-50 peers at any given time (depends on your connection and CPU) on a typical DSL. The 3D swarm works fine in that regard IMO. It's no killer feature anyway so ignore it at your own leisure.

All joking aside: Azureus has one hell of a crappy interface. Mostly that is because it is a java app and they all seem to have similar appearance problems in Mac OS X. The Wintel version of Az is much nicer but it still sucks rocks. It's worse on the Mac.

Nevermind that BoW is still in beta and the appearance is beta too.
BTW: There is no such thing as a "proper" cocoa toolbar. There isn't one in Safari for instance and that's a cocoa app. -

[Twilly Spree]

Originally posted by Thinine:
I tried it out a few weeks ago. It has much less CPU usage than the official client, and a lot of the same features as Azureus, but it quite slow when downloading (low download rates), at least compared to the official client. It's also a RAM hog (36MB real memory usage, at the minimum) and like Millennium said, it doesn't have that great of an interface.

Maybe it is a RAM hog because it caches the most active torrent parts in RAM to reduce hard-drive activity - just like Azureus does.

I really don't understand people who like the messed up Az interface but hey - to each his own

[Moose]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Are you sure that this is a Cocoa app? Not that Cocoa has any meaning whatsoever except in the eyes of zealots, but this app doesn't live up to Cocoa's reputation for somehow magically making an app good. It doesn't even have a proper Cocoa toolbar.

[Rest of retardation deleted.]

Bits on Wheels:
/System/Library/Frameworks/Cocoa.framework/Versions/A/Cocoa (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 9.0.0)
/usr/lib/libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib (compatibility version 0.9.7, current version 0.9.7)
/System/Library/Frameworks/OpenGL.framework/Versions/A/OpenGL (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/GLUT.framework/Versions/A/GLUT (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Carbon (compatibility version 2.0.0, current version 128.0.0)
/usr/lib/libmx.A.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 47.1.0)
/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 71.1.1)

I suggest you spend your time looking for the different 4K78 with the same MD5 sum as the FC instead of trolling Cocoa zealots.

[MacGorilla]

Originally posted by forkies:
looks pretty sweet. the 3d swarm graph is mesmerizing.

I'd say. Pretty cool.

Who cares if it's Cocoa or not, if it's a RAM hog or not, or even if it's slow or not... that 3D swarm feature alone makes it worth downloading and trying out. It's cool!

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Does it use LESS CPU or Memory than the original Bit? Does it download faster?
If not what is the point of using it?

[Thinine]

It uses much less CPU on my iBook 500, but the same or greater amount of RAM. I also found that it's download speeds are much lower than the official client.

[Twilly Spree]

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Does it use LESS CPU or Memory than the original Bit? Does it download faster?
If not what is the point of using it?

It uses similar CPU as the official BitTorrent client but more RAM because it caches popular pieces to reduce HD activity, burdening your system less in the process. I think it is a fair trade. It has a better overview of your torrents and when ready will offer more options than the official client. It is also just 600+ KB in size compared to the official client so it is leaner too.

Why use it? It all depends, but it is nice to have alternatives. This is just a beta and it looks/works nice.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by Thinine:
I also found that it's download speeds are much lower than the official client.

If that is true than nuts to that app.

[Twilly Spree]

There are only a few things that prevent me from jumping ship to BoW from Az, namely that Az uses only one listening port, that Az shows the size of the swarm, that Az keeps better statistics and that Az has more preferences+tweaks to optimize it for my f-cked up network.

BoW destroys the official BitTorrent client though in every way. There is no download speed difference between ANY of the available clients. Nor should there be, they are all bittorrent protocol which is open source. The only difference is interface, options, CPU consumtion and RAM consumption.

[Wevah]

Originally posted by Twilly Spree:
BTW: There is no such thing as a "proper" cocoa toolbar. There isn't one in Safari for instance and that's a cocoa app. -

I'm gonna have to disagree with you there; NSToolbar is there for a reason. ;P

[Thinine]

Originally posted by Twilly Spree:
There is no download speed difference between ANY of the available clients. Nor should there be, they are all bittorrent protocol which is open source. The only difference is interface, options, CPU consumtion and RAM consumption.

Actually, there can be quite a difference between implementations, depending on the algorithm the client uses. There are a number of factors that can affect the overall speed of a torrent (choking algorithm implementation, pipelining the TCP transfers, snubbing algorithm implementation, etc.) and apparently BoW's implementation of these various problems are less efficient than the official client, at least in my experience. Also, merely caching pieces of the files to RAM cannot explain the massive RAM usage, since it starts at 36MB, even if you don't have any pieces. And it really wouldn't save you that much disk access to cache the most popular pieces to memory, since those would only be accessed once for every peer you're connected to. What most clients do cache to memory are the pieces that are only partially transferred from a peer, preferring to wait until you have the entire piece before writing it to disk. But again, this doesn't entirely explain the massive memory usage.

Technical issues aside, I really think that Bits on Wheels is a horrible, horrible name.

[Twilly Spree]

It is a silly name but so is Windows XP.

Azureus uses a 40 MB cache for storing bits. Seems to me 36 MBs are perfectly normal for such an app.

For me there is no speed difference between the 4 clients I've tried. Only a difference in feaatures and resource requirements.

[Sarc]

so far ... I'm sticking with Azureus

1) I get slower with BoW
2) Azureus only needs 1 port
3) More stats + tweaking optionz in Az

BoW hogs much less CPU though, and the memory thing, behaves more like a leak than massive usage.

anyway, there is one client I would like to have in Mac OS X, BitComet. It's made on C++ so it could come to OS X, alas, it's source is closed, but running much faster and hogging far less resources.
Overall it's a C++ Azureus, with all the powerful features.
It has one very useful feature that I'm sure is very easy to implement, when you open a torrent file that has many file sin it (ie. an MP3 album), it asks what file syou want to download right away.

[Moose]

Originally posted by Sarc:
It's made on C++ so it could come to OS X

In today's dog-eat-dog world of high level languages and even higher level APIs and toolkits, the language makes slightly less difference than the toolkit used.

If you're trying to port an MFC (or even a .Net application written in C++) application to Mac OS X directly, you're just asking for trouble (and, if you manage to pull it off, a shitty, shitty port). Those types of projects are better re-implemented from scratch.

[sushiism]

was it really too hard to use a proper toolbar?

[Weyland-Yutani]

Bits on Wheels has been updated.

cheers

W-Y

[Millennium]

Is the interface properly Mac-like yet? Does it at least use an NSToolbar? It has some interesting features, but even Azureus is more Mac-like at this point.

[Weyland-Yutani]

I'm not sure if the interface has changed much. Still does not use NSToolbar though. In the latest version you can create torrents.

A bit more polished perhaps. New app icon.

cheers

W-Y

[phillryu]

Eww, what an ugly UI.

[Chuckit]

Azureus is more Maclike? How so?

[wataru]

Originally Posted by voodoo

It has many of the advanced features of Azureus but none of the Java crap that one has to endure with Azureus.

Oh no! It's Java! Run!

Grow up

[Weyland-Yutani]

Originally Posted by wataru

Oh no! It's Java! Run!

Grow up

That post was made six months ago. Snappy comeback wataru.

cheers

W-Y

[wataru]

No less true today than it was back then.

**** off

w

[Weyland-Yutani]

Originally Posted by wataru

No less true today than it was back then.

**** off

w

Quite a knee-jerk reaction there pal. Give the rest a break from your thoughts why don't you?

Stay on topic, please.

cheers

W-Y

[wataru]

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Again, **** off

w

[mindwaves]

Settle down please.

[mindwaves]

Or face the consequences.