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.

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.

Hello all. I know that there hasn’t been an update to torrent-fu in a while, here’s why:

It came to my attention that the current barcode lookup provider would be shutting the app down soon (meaning all barcode lookups will return ” “), so I have been spending a lot of time collecting barcodes and compiling a database here so that there will be no need for 3rd party lookups,  terms,  and excess data. The database is a simple UPC/EAN lookup with only keyword info (like title) from products. I will be releasing an update soon that hooks in to this new database and would like to ask anyone who scans a barcode and gets the message that a product was not found to submit a title (directly through torrent-fu) of what it is so that the community as a whole can help each other out by expanding the database. I have found some files on line that have large numbers of CDs/DVDs and their respective barcodes that I am integrating to my data, so hopefully a lot of what you scan will be found. The new data has worked far better on my dvd collection so far

I am working hard to finish the RSS features for adding new sites to the search. If I can I will add them in the release, if not, it will come shortly after.

I’d like input on letting you (the community) enter product names for barcodes that aren’t found. Do you think that is a good feature? Would you yourself use it? Let me know in the comments.

I just put 1.3.5 on the market. The release just fixes a few little bugs and adds more ui polish including menus for everything , confirmations on remove and remove and delete data and progress indicators for actions so you can see when things are happening. Thanks to everyone who gave suggestions and reported bugs!

I have a new release I want to put on the market this week with a couple of usability updates (progress dialogs, comfirmation for remove/remove and delete, made a new add from browser dialog, etc.) If you’re interested post a comment below and I’ll pass on a QR code to download the beta. I just want a quick beta to make sure nothing breaks so I can post the update officially as quickly as possible.

I just published Torrent-fu 1.3 to the android market. While the biggest change is support for Transmission, here’s a few other notables:

• Torrent management view adds upload/download rates
• webui.token_auth support for uTorrent for better security
• SingleTask on activities (so cycling through UI is smoother)
• friendly error messages on failure to connect to torrent client.

I’m working on reorganizing the site and adding/updating tutorials today.

I stumbled on this review of the 4 torrent controllers on android market, by Phonedog.com today, Torrent-fu did pretty good on the review. The reviewer really took a liking to Transdroid, and ended out giving the win to both Transdroid and Torrent-fu. It’s not an in depth review, but it was interesting to see someone showing all apps head to head, especially the non-free ones. He didn’t say that Torrent-fu had a controller to stop/start/pause/resume/remove torrents though , but like he said “it’s not an in depth review”.

I finished up Transmission support today, but I’d like to beta it before the official market release. I’ll be testing over the next couple days, if you are a brave soul and want to test it out reply to this post and I will send you a QR code. Otherwise expect the official release with transmission support in the next few days. I’ll start looking into adding support for other clients over the next week.