Bloggy

There’s a beta release of the next BitTorrent program. My notes:

1. The readme included with the source distribution says that installation instructions are included in the INSTALL.unix file. Unfortunately, you won’t actually find that file with the source. Don’t worry though, I didn’t let a minor thing like that stop me.
2. The application now uses GTK instead of wxWindows. Sort of a step sideways if you ask me, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing, as pyGTK does seem to be better for cross-platform development than pyQt at this point.
3. Unfortunately, the GUI is, IMO, horrid. I don’t even want to imagine what aseigo would say about it. For example, even though it seems to require GTK 2.4, it still uses the old GTK file chooser dialog.
4. Bonus GUI disaster: You cannot resize the application unless you pass the “–advanced 1″ options to the program. Thanks for saving us from ourselves, BitTorrent devs. What would we have ever done if you hadn’t saved us from making the application larger.

Anyways, I didn’t get a chance to try downloading a torrent with it, as the KNOPPIX torrent I had lying around was apparently expired. Overall the application shows potential, and it’s nice that they’re not leaving it as simply a bare bones GUI example. But I think we should get the protocol figured out for KDE 4.0 (perhaps with KGet NG), otherwise we’re never going to have a good GUI BitTorrent program for KDE.

Posted by mpyne under Uncategorized |