Yesterday we announced that µTorrent for Mac beta was out, and after 12 hours of testing I’m happy to post a review of what this torrent client brings to the table. Over two months back we reviewed the leaked internal release of the world’s favourite BitTorrent app—µTorrent. It was buggy and didn’t work for most part. Let’s see how the official beta presents itself to the Mac community…
The developers have revamped the interface, added and removed some features since then. This beta release is completely different than what we saw 2 months back. Let’s take a look at all the features that the client currently posesses. Remember, it’s still a beta and missing features will be added sooner or later.
Features
We want a lot more features to be added when they release a stable release. Nevertheless it’s a fully functional client. Let’s run through the features.
- Partial files download support
- DHT and Peer exchange support (for public trackers only)
- Drag and drop support
- Monitors any folder for torrents and trashes them once added to the queue
- Throttle transfer speed from the status bar
- Automatic NAT-PMP or UPnP port forwarding
- Last but not the least, µTorrent flagship feature—light and less resource hungry.
Two notable featurea are absent. One is the torrent scheduling. Another important one is the New Torrent creation. Both of these were present in the alpha leaked copy. Dock badges for current download and upload speeds, a mac client speciality, are notoriously missing.
Interface
The app looks and behaves like any other Mac app and looks ‘elegant’. Also they’ve cleared some unwanted elements and it looks totally clutter free. You’ve the option of hiding the left pane and bottom pane.
The famous info pane is present which can now be hidden too. They developers should consider adding at least two more features to it. The ‘chocolate bar’ pieces indicator (was present in the leaked copy) and the transfer speed graph (present in the windows version).
The download/upload rates are now shown in the status bar. You can also control the speeds there. Nice and innovative. Never seen like this before. The dock badges bandwidth transfer speed feature is not present.
Core-animation effects comes to µTorrent. Noticed some snazzy animation effects. A refreshing change for a torrent client.
Performance
Performance wise this beta version works well. All the features present works well. Transfers rates were also normal.
Drag and drop a torrent file and it automatically adds to the queue. Also there was not an instant when it crashed in the 12+ hours I tested.
Even after running close to 10 hours, the app took 24MB of memory. This is why many love this app. It’s fast, light and not resource hungry.
Wrapping up
Good to see the µTorrent client for Mac. It’s about time. Being a beta app, use at your risk as there will be a few bugs here and there. But it seemed functional without any issues.
This is by no means match even 50% of the awesomeness of Windows version. But historically the µTorrent devs have added features slowly over a period of time. Expecting the same for the Mac version too. [Milind: As always, no matter how awesome the Windows version is, in my opinion Transmission wins hands down, compared to any version of µTorrent.]
Still a long way to go before we can replace it as our default client. It’s now like a pizza with only cheese. We want it served with multiple toppings and seasoning.
