14 DAY TRIAL // While still in Beta, uTorrent is being cleansed and “purified” once every few days since its official introduction for the Macintosh last month. The latest version of uTorrent for Mac delivers enhancements spanning CPU usage, error message display, and selective downloading.
uTorrent is a BitTorrent client, which follows the rules of a protocol such as HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). BitTorrent is a protocol allowing you to download files quickly, by permitting its download and the upload of parts of it at the same time.
Since it is a lot cheaper, faster, and more efficient to distribute files using BitTorrent than a regular download, the method is often resorted to for distribution of very large files, very popular files, and files available for free. Just as there are multiple HTTP clients, there are multiple BitTorrent clients, and uTorrent is one such client.
One of the recent updates to uTorrent for Mac works around a problem in Mac OS that caused a crash in Finder when double-clicking on “.torrent” file when uTorrent was the default application for .torrent files. With version 0.9.0.2 Build 13691 (Beta) released, the team of developers hopes to have finally fixed 100% CPU usage when Peer Guardian is installed. The folks at BitTorrent Inc also claim that uTorrent 0.9.0.2 should make “too many open files” errors less frequent, but also fix some issues related to selective downloading of files - setting a file to “don't download.”
A forum post signed by kjk, one of the µTorrent Mac Developers, reveals that “uTorrent Mac is currently released as Intel only and only for 10.5 (Leopard). Preliminary support for PPC is in the binary, but it is unstable and not recommended for general use. PPC support will improve in the near future,” the post reads.
NOTES:
· BitTorrent is purely a content distribution method, and does not incorporate any technology to differentiate between content that is legitimately shared and content that is pirated – just like a web browser.
· Anybody can see your IP address when using peer to peer clients such as µTorrent. This identifies your computer on the Internet, so you'd better not break your country's laws concerning copyrighted content while using µTorrent.