Torrent-Fu

I just found out about a nice tool by Ryon Sherman called ut-brigde(via a comment in the Android Market on Torrent-fu.) It’s described as a “Modular uTorrent Bridge” which is basically a converter for other torrent clients to uTorrent API spec. What that means for you is: if you install his app you can connect other torrent clients (currently rTorrent, but more in the future) with Torrent-fu since it uses uTorrent WebUI APIs. If you’re a coder, you can help out and add support for more clients (more info at the project page)

I just published the latest update to Torent-fu to the Android Market. I already went over the features in my last post so here’s a quick list of notables:

• Custom search providers – If your favorite torrent site offers RSS searching, you can now add it to the sites that Torrent-fu searches.
• New barcode database – Torrent-fu now has a dedicated database of UPC/EAN codes. Since it is less complete than the previous provider, it is community powered. If a scan produces no results, you can type keywords that will be added to the central database, and when others scan the same barcode later your keywords will be used.
• torrentmonkeys.com in the built-in searches ( isohunt and mininova are still included as well)
• fix for incorrect progress reporting in transmission
• green progress bars (i never liked the orange)

If you find any problems let me know here or via email in the market.

For one reason or another, this weekend I decided to try my hand at porting a simple (and relatively old) Java torrent library, called Snark, to android. Most of the code worked directly on android, but needed some updating to meet current protocol specs (it was last modified in 2003). After 2 days of researching and hacking, I successfully downloaded a torrent using only my phone. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but I just wanted to let those of you who have asked about a client that can download to the phone that I’ve made some progress.