Torrent-Fu

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.

I just finished up the 2 major new features of Torrent-fu: Custom searches and new barcode lookups.  The first by request, the second out of necessity.

I posted before that the barcode lookup service currently in use by Torrent-fu will be shutting the app out. After searching for a new service to no avail, I began compiling resources from around the web in to my own barcode database. It is far from complete, but works pretty good. You can help make it better though. When the new version of Torrent-fu fails to find a barcode you will see the following prompt, where you can enter a name to associate with the barcode, which will go in to the Torrent-fu UPC/EAN database. The next time someone scans that barcode the product name you entered will be used. Torrent-fu will also search for the term you enter too. Hopefully the database will grow to include most items people search for (the current item count is around a million).

Now on to the good stuff: Custom searches.

The new custom search feature uses RSS. I chose the RSS format for a few reasons:

1. most torrent search sites provide RSS

2. RSS feeds are (for the most part) standardized

3. to keep the complexity of adding providers to a minimum (everyone likes things that are easy.) There are 2 required items and one optional item needed to add a provider: a name, a URL (with a token that gets replaced by the search term) and an optional item to specify a non standard tag name to get the torrent url from (usually not needed)

Some pitfalls I found in RSS were:

1. Not all RSS feeds provide a link to the actual torrent, some provide a url to a page where the torrent can be downloaded. If no direct link to a file is provided, Torrent-fu will send you to the page where you can download the torrent, then using the browser integration send the file to your torrent client. If a direct link is provided, it will be treated like the built in providers (isohunt, mininova, and the newest adidtion torrentmonkeys)  for a more seemless experience.

2. I haven’t come up with an easy method to allow users to specify parsing of seeds/leechers/sizes. Until (and if) I do, torrents from custom search providers will not show those details in the search results screen. Torrents that can be downloaded seemlessly will look like this:

And Search results that will open in the browser will look like this:

If anyone would like to beta the new features, comment here or send me an email (you can find my email in the Android Market) and I’ll send you an .apk within the next 2 days.

Version 1.2 is coming along well, I’ve added sorting to the search results and the torrent view. If you noticed there I phrased the second “torrent view”, that’s because I just finished code modifications to add support for other web enabled torrent clients. The base has also been built for multiple “profiles”, that is multiple locations to send torrents to, for example if you have 2 computers with web enabled torrent clients you can now store each as a seperate “profile” and when you are prompted to send a torrent there is now a list of locations the file can be sent. The last few steps before Torent-fu 1.2 can be released are: 

• rebuilding the preferences screen to handle multiple profiles
• adding more controllers for other web enabled clients (transmission, etc)

I originally set release to be this weekend, but I have family coming in to town for the weekend so it may be pushed back another week. I’m working as fast as I can though so we’ll see.

Thanks to everyone who left comments and feature requests, hope you will like the new stuff. I’ll post some screenshots of the new version soon. Thanks for your patience!

Just a quick update, i’m currently working on a UI refresh, the torrent view screen is getting progress bars, background refreshes (so the progressbars update without having to refresh), font size reduction on titles and better filtering of lists. On the functionality side I’m working on making the barcode search better, adding more search providers to the built in search (Torrent-fu already works with any site that sends mime types with the torrent directly in the browser), and possibly extending support to other torrent programs instead of just uTorrent. If anyone knows of a good Mac torrent app with a web interface, let me know. As of yet I have not seen a way to add WebUI to uTorrent in the Mac beta version. Also, if there are any features anyone wants added, post them here and I’ll try to add them in this update.

Oh, the app now has almost 2500 downloads. Thanks to everyone that downloaded!