Being a third-worlder born-and-bred, one of the first things I set up upon acquiring the Macbook Pro last week was file-sharing in OSXland. (This is the part where a more responsible blogger would admonish his readers to only download files that are provided under a free license. Shyeah right.)
As I stated in my previous entry, the bittorrent client I’m currently using, Transmission, leaves a lot to be desired. Basic things like being able to manage the files within a torrent (e.g., select which specific files you want to download, or prioritize the order in which you want to download them), are curiously missing and if you’ve had any amount of experience with bittorrent, you know that those features are must-haves. (For example, if you were downloading an entire season of Lost, you wouldn’t want to wait for all 24 episodes to finish downloading before you started watching the first one, right?) Practically the only thing impressive about Transmission is that its icon actually displays the current download and/or upload rate, which can be handy.
In terms of alternatives, you’ve got Tomato (uber-basic) and Azureus (which I like to refer to as "The Microsoft Office of bittorrent clients"). Neither of them are viable alternatives if you want to a) have a reasonable amount of control over your torrents and b) still have enough system resources available to run a browser.
Recently, there’s been some excitement over the heir apparent to Transmission, XTorrent, developed by the creator of Newsfire and Acquisition, David Watanabe. Although it shares a lot of Transmission’s core library, it’s gathering momentum pretty quickly and should probably achieve a relative feature parity with the de facto standard uTorrent fairly soon. Transmission, meanwhile, has not released anything in nearly 5 months. Currently, XTorrent’s killer feature is the ability to search various torrent sites directly from its interface; like its brother Acquisition, it also integrates very neatly with iTunes, automatically appending downloaded audio and video files to your iTunes library as they complete.