Month: June 2009

A quick overview of the Transdroid widget

Today I released the 0.9.0 version of Transdroid. It includes some bugfixes and an update for the Deluge daemon, but most importantly it now has a home screen widget.

It shows the status of all torrents combined: how many are downloading, at which speed and how long will it take to finish them all? The number of uploads and inactive torrents are shown as well. Finally, the Transdroid icon opens Transdroid and a refresh button is provided. To not drain your battery, the data is only updated when requested manually. Hope you like this brand new feature!

A side notice: since app widgets are Cupcake (Android 1.5) only, this is now the minimum required version. If you have any troubles with this, please let me know. Older versions are always available for download.

The user is always right

Le client est roi. The Transdroid userbase is still growing on a daily basis, having thousands of active installs on Android devices all over the world. But since there is always room for improvement, I regularly get new feature requests in the issue tracker. Although not all of them can be implemented, I am still trying to build in as much as possible. Most of the updates since my last ‘features’ blog post actually came from user requests. Here are the ones that made it to the new version:

  • rTorrent support (request 7)
  • Search term history (requested in a Market comment)
  • Starting and stopping of torrents, supported by uTorrent and rTorrent (request 11)
  • .torrent file uploads (currently only for Transmission) to handle password-protected torrent sites (request 29)
  • French and Italian translations (want to help? mail me a translated strings.xml)
  • Reverse sort order (requested in a Market comment)

Any requests yourself? Just submit them to the issue tracker! More to come.

Android remote torrent client comparison

UPDATE: I updated the feature table to reflect newer versions of the applications. (24 August 2010)

For some time now, there are four apps on the market that allow you to control your active torrents remotely. So how does Transdroid relate to its three competitors? Droiddog released a nice video review on all four. He tells only about the basic features, but thinks Transdroid and Torrent-Fu are the winners.

What he didn’t cover was the difference in features that the apps have. I have made a little feature comparison table for that. Hope I didn’t leave out any (let me know).

Transdroid Torrent-Fu BarTor Torrent Droid
Website here here here here
Price Free (FOSS) Free $1.49 £1.00
Client support
Multiple profiles Yes Yes No Yes
uTorrent/BitTorrent Yes Yes Yes Yes
Transmission Yes Yes No No
Vuze/Azereus Yes No Yes Yes
KTorrent Yes No Yes No
rTorrent Yes No No No
Deluge Yes (1.2+) No No No
Torrentflux-b4rt Yes No No No
Searching and adding
In-app search Yes Yes Yes No
Torrent sites 9 2 1 Browser-only
Barcode scanning Yes Yes Yes Yes
Add via browser Yes Yes Yes Yes
Add local .torrent Yes No No Yes
Management
In-app listing Yes Yes No No
In-app management Yes Yes No Web-UI
Individual files Yes No No No
RSS feeds Yes No No No
Widget Yes No No No
Alarm service Yes No No No