MacTorrent - BitTorrent for Mac OS 9

[devils_advisor]

Wow!

First Reports are coming in!

It is a well working Bittorrent client! The first one for Mac OS 9. And it is damn fast! I am stunned.
Here is a unsorted list of things that I recognised:

• The different tabs (peers, files, pieces, log) are somtimes not working correctly. Mainly the log is scrolling, and I have to switch from one tab back to the other  to see what should be displayed in  "peers" instead of the logs.

• "Progress values" are switching back and foreward, ... 5,1 MB, 4,8 MB, 5,9MB, ... that seems to stabilize after two minutes

• But that values are not correctly compared to what is downloaded in reality. All files I had, have been 3 times bigger than this progress values in the client are.

• the "knob" for resizing the window is over the button "inject peer" always on the right side, no matter how big the window is.

• nice would be a possibility to move the border between "downloading" and "main window space" to be able to see the enire names of the torrents, if someone likes to do so.

• missing is the functionality to "paste" from the menue or with the mouse. Recently only "Command v" works for pasting torrent urls.

• any "about dialouge" is missing

• when I klick at the menu bar, all downloading stops until I release it again, ... why?

• I do not understand "pice selection" what is it?

• I don´t understand the "markers" in the progress bar. It looks more than markers in ProTools then any progress. They appeare in green everywhere. but without a bar, just a small stripe (about 20 to 30 of them). Perhaps a problem that updating doesn´t work like it should?

• Did I tell that it is damn fast?

• I like the "classical" appeareance. Perhaps you could get rid of the "tabs" as well, and make it completely "Platinum like"? Or at least make the tabs also in Platnum look?

the progress values as you can see in the bar it is downloading pieces from everywhere and that doesnt mean the file comes in from start to end. it takes a few pieces here and there and puts it in place on your machine but not in order like the alphabet.

[Mat]

the progress values as you can see in the bar it is downloading pieces from everywhere and that doesnt mean the file comes in from start to end. it takes a few pieces here and there and puts it in place on your machine but not in order like the alphabet.

Now that you´ve explained it, it is absolutely logical. 

[Knezzen]

• The different tabs (peers, files, pieces, log) are somtimes not working correctly. Mainly the log is scrolling, and I have to switch from one tab back to the other  to see what should be displayed in  "peers" instead of the logs.

Im thinking that this tab idea is a bad thing. Im thinking about putting the logs in a sepparate window that you can open through a menu and ditching the "pieces" all together. Logging is a good feature to have if your download isn't working, but otherwise it just eats resources.

• "Progress values" are switching back and foreward, ... 5,1 MB, 4,8 MB, 5,9MB, ... that seems to stabilize after two minutes

I think this one you might have to live with. MacTorrent don't calculate the overall transfer speed, it just tells you the speed it got the last "piece" or segment of the download, and that's why you might get a "jumpy" transfer rate.

• But that values are not correctly compared to what is downloaded in reality. All files I had, have been 3 times bigger than this progress values in the client are.

This is because the Mac OS finder is a bit cruel in it's calculation of the file size. It just looks at the start and end of the file and assumes that the file is full of data. But because BitTorrent downloads are non linear, it might download the last bytes of the file first, and then jump to the middle and then to the beginning of the file etc. This makes the Mac OS finder THINK that the whole file is full, even though only it's start and end points are written. Im having a hard time explaining, but I hope you understand. Try downloading an ISO file from somewhere and stop the download after 10-15 seconds or so. Look up file size of the downloaded file in the finder and it will probably tell you that it is several hundred megabytes in size. So don't trust the finder in this case

• the "knob" for resizing the window is over the button "inject peer" always on the right side, no matter how big the window is.

Will fix this ASAP

• nice would be a possibility to move the border between "downloading" and "main window space" to be able to see the enire names of the torrents, if someone likes to do so.

Will look if this can be done without messing up the GUI too much.

• missing is the functionality to "paste" from the menue or with the mouse. Recently only "Command v" works for pasting torrent urls.

Will take a look at it.

• any "about dialouge" is missing

Not prioritized, but will be added in the near future

• when I klick at the menu bar, all downloading stops until I release it again, ... why?

The download doesn't stop, the OS just stops updating the main window. I can't do anything about this without any major surgery, so it wont get solved.
This is only visual, everything keeps running in the background, so no harm is done to your downloads
Pro Tools does the same thing when opening a menu while you play your session. It keeps playing, but the main window stops being updated.

• I do not understand "pice selection" what is it?

This is a visual update of what you see in the progress bar. It's the data blocks of the file or files your downloading.
It does nothing except taking up resources and looks sortof cool. Will probably be removed in the future to gain some speed.

• I don´t understand the "markers" in the progress bar. It looks more than markers in ProTools then any progress. They appeare in green everywhere. but without a bar, just a small stripe (about 20 to 30 of them). Perhaps a problem that updating doesn´t work like it should?

Like devils_advisor explained this is because of BitTorrents non linear nature. You download what's avaliable to download regardless if it's the beginning or the end of the file. Some user might have the end of the file and some might have the beginning. I don't think I will remove it. You have the procentage number ticking up to show you the overall progress, the bar shows you what blocks or "pieces" you have downloaded so far.

• Did I tell that it is damn fast?

I guess this is a good thing

• I like the "classical" appeareance. Perhaps you could get rid of the "tabs" as well, and make it completely "Platinum like"? Or at least make the tabs also in Platnum look?

Im thinking of redesigning the interface and make it more "Macish" when all the fuctionality is where it should be


Did you run out of memory? Did you see how much memory MacTorrent used? Preferred size is set to 64mb now, but I don't know if it's too low.

[Knezzen]

So, I have updated MacTorrent a bit again

Changelog:

• Removed "pieces" tab
• Removed "log" tab
• Moved the "Inject peer" field away from the resize modifier and made it more obvious what it does.
• Fixed pasting of torrent URL through "edit" menu
• Added "About MacTorrent" in the Apple menu by popular request
• Changed "piece selection" to "download algorithm" since it's a better name for what the menu does
• You can now resize the torrent list using the resize modifier in the white field where you have the + and - icons.
• General speed improvements
• Added some icons, but Im not sure that I want to use them later on

I guess that's all for now. Tell me what you think and give me some more feedback!

Same thing as the last time. Don't spread the file, it's not finished yet

[Mat]

Cool!

I am just reporting about the remaining or new problems! Be sure I appreciate your work a lot and it is already working great!

-) First I had a strange problem that the log always got displayed, even if it shouldn´t anymore at all, if I am right? But it was there at the Peers and the Files window. While the log scrolled the whole time, the GUI of the client was unusable. Completely.

-) Is the "check filesystem" new? Should it make it possible to resume downloads? I tried the same dl after I stopped it, and after a check, the client told me "pices not matching" or similar?

-) The client now can block my Mac (this time a G4/733) for 10-20 seconds. If the client is heavily working, the Finder or other programs sometimes do not react anymore for 10 seconds. The former version didn´t block the system that way. I did another test right now, it is even worse. I cannot type here in Classilla anymore. The machine needs at least 20 seconds for one character. Switching back to the client and stopping the download even took me 3 minutes right now.
Perhaps some "overmotivated" multitasking adjustment for your quite fast machine?

-) The progress bar is now displaying nothing 60% are white, 40% are green an that´s it. Where is the progress?

-)  The "About" is damn cool – very Macish! But you can keep "THE" in normal letters "The" is more true and less marketing, as it is simply the only one, and you do not have to show the following generations that you had to be recognized below 20 clients. It is simply the only one

Keep up that good work!

[Knezzen]

-) First I had a strange problem that the log always got displayed, even if it shouldn´t anymore at all, if I am right? But it was there at the Peers and the Files window. While the log scrolled the whole time, the GUI of the client was unusable. Completely.

I can't reproduce this. Did you have any torrents remaining from the last version of the client in the list?

-) Is the "check filesystem" new? Should it make it possible to resume downloads? I tried the same dl after I stopped it, and after a check, the client told me "pices not matching" or similar?

It was there before. It checks your files connected to the torrents to see where it should begin downloading again. This is so you can resume downloading after you quit the client.
Pieces not matching might be related to torrents remaining in the list that you started with the last version of the client. Could you try it "fresh", that is without any torrents in the new client, add one, let it download for a while and then quit. See if it comes back when the application is restarted.

-) The client now can block my Mac (this time a G4/733) for 10-20 seconds. If the client is heavily working, the Finder or other programs sometimes do not react anymore for 10 seconds. The former version didn´t block the system that way. I did another test right now, it is even worse. I cannot type here in Classilla anymore. The machine needs at least 20 seconds for one character. Switching back to the client and stopping the download even took me 3 minutes right now.
Perhaps some "overmotivated" multitasking adjustment for your quite fast machine?

This is strange. Im currently downloading two torrents when Im writing this in Classilla without any issues. The fans don't even come on. According to "ProcessInfo" the new client is using way less CPU resources than the last version as well. Did you have any "left over" torrents that you started downloading with the last client? Might have something to do with it. I started mine fresh with the new one and so far no issues, so I can't reproduce your issues. This is on a 1ghz PowerBook G4 Titanium with 1gb of RAM.

-) The progress bar is now displaying nothing 60% are white, 40% are green an that´s it. Where is the progress?

No idea. Did you run out of seeders for your torrent perhaps? I just finished one of my downloads and the bar is fully green and by the text in the Progress fileld is showing the full file size of the file and "100%". I need more details to be able to reproduce.

-)  The "About" is damn cool – very Macish! But you can keep "THE" in normal letters "The" is more true and less marketing, as it is simply the only one, and you do not have to show the following generations that you had to be recognized below 20 clients. It is simply the only one

Allright boss

I do need some better icons, so please help me find some!

EDIT:
I did something ugly when removing the log function. Should be fixed in the next version.
I wonder if this is why you had speed problems... Will email you a new binary to test.

[MacTron]

I'm testing MacTorrent, and with some files everything work OK, but with others I'm having most of the issues Mat wrote about.

I did something ugly when removing the log function. Should be fixed in the next version.
I wonder if this is why you had speed problems...

Please post the next version as soon as you can.
Anyway thanks for this great work!
 

[Knezzen]

I have made alot of improvements so far, so the versions here are very old. Will post one tonight

[Knezzen]

Added the newest binary as well as a changelog to the first post in this thread.

Check it out!

[Knezzen]

Added MacTorrent 0.1.8 to the first post as well as a small change log.

Enjoy!

[MacTron]

Added MacTorrent 0.1.8 to the first post as well as a small change log.

Enjoy!

Thank you very much  . This 0.1.8 version is working much better and have a much better Mac Os 9 look and feel.

About the GUI flickers, I'm afraid that are caused by RealBasic way of working
I'm never was a fan of it ...

[Knezzen]

About the GUI flickers, I'm afraid that are caused by RealBasic way of working
I'm never was a fan of it ...

It's the nature of Mac OS 9.2.2 and earlier. OSX have double buffered graphics by default, so you don't get the flickering there. What causes it is the way the peer list is populated. The flickering stops if I inactivate it, but I don't want to do that. So I need to populate the list in another way then what is done now.

Glad it works better than the previous version you used. That means I'm doing something right at least

[Knezzen]

0.1.9 will be released some time this week. I want to implement some kind of overall speed indication before I release it.

The major things new in this release is dramatically reduced flicker, even lower system usage than in 0.1.8 and the ability to choose where you want your files to be downloaded to (as requested by Mat).

Will try to get rid of the flicker all together, but I don't want to promise anything

[Knezzen]

Updated the first post with MacTorrent 0.2.0 info

[Bolkonskij]

Awesome job, Knez! Love the approach of using existing realbasic code and backporting it while throwing out the bloat. Heck, now I'm eager to try that myself since it's something that can be done over a few weekends.

Would you be interested in sharing your knowledge in a quick introductionary topic here? (recommended software setup, how-to, do's & dont's etc.)

[Knezzen]

As you might remember Bolkonskij, I worked on this during the MacDomain days but I didn't have enough skills to do anything else than mess around with the source. Didn't really know what I was doing back then.

Time took it's toll, and after some years of messing around in VB and RB (and even with some C) I thought it was time to make this stuff work at last .

For MacTorrent specifically I'm using 2 different plugins. The most important one is Monkeybread Softwares "Util Plugin" which enables me to use SHA1 hashing. The other plugin is Einhugur's IconLib which is used to draw OS specific icons in the file list.

I'm using REALbasic 2006 Release 3 for the build since this is the very last version able to build Mac OS Classic binaries (not Carbon based) and can still use quite modern plugins and methods. This makes it more compatible with recent REALbasic and Xojo code. It's therefore easier to find examples and plugins for it than for the very old 5.5.5 (last pre-OSX running version).

It's quite difficult to do a how-to or similliar and I don't know where I should start with something like this.

I think that the best thing to do if one wants to learn RB or Xojo (or any other language for that matter) is to find an open source project that you find interesting and just mock about in the code until you understand what it all does .

This is what I have done to learn.

[IIO]

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[IIO]

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[IIO]

forgot folders

[Knezzen]

Thanks a lot IIO! Have added the icons to the project. Will be included in the 0.2.1 release