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.

The new Transdroid has just been released to the market, with quite a few new features. Most exiting, I think, is support for two new torrent applications: Deluge 1.2 and BitTorrent 6.

Deluge is a pretty popular cross-platform torrent app that includes a pretty neat web interface. Apparently they had some troubles with the remote API, but these will be fixed from version 1.2 on. This is actually still in development, but for anyone that can’t wait, Transdroid supports your favourite client now as well!

BitTorrent is the name of the original protocol client and has just seen a switch in focus. From version 6 onwards it basically is a re-branded version of µTorrent. Well, since µTorrent was already supported, BitTorrent 6 is now as well. So if you use this client, Transdroid can provide you with a nice remote client for Android.

Planned for the near future is to add rTorrent support, which is mainly used on headless boxes. But already included in this update are some minor new features:

• Optional auto refresh with settable interval (5 seconds to 1 hour)
• Option to show only the actively downloading torrents in the list
• When removing a torrent, you now have the option to remove any downloaded data as well
• Localisation: besides English it currently only includes Dutch

Yet another step towards maturing the applicaiton. Do you want to help with the project? It would be very nice if you could translate a single .xml file in your language. Just send it to me by mail so I can include in the next release.

After the buzz about cupcake, or just Android 1.5 as it’s officially called, it is finally being rolled out to regular users around the world. My G1 just got its over-the-air update today, actually. Time to test Transdroid of course!

Luckily, everything works fine without a single change. Still, I upgraded the source code to the new SDK development tools and later on I might focus more on newer, 1.5-specific features. For now there are some improvements for all platforms.

Some bugs are fixed, for example searching from the search results window (maybe you mistyped something). More importantly rotating your device’s screen doesn’t result in a possibly long new fetch of torrents on your server. And pausing, resuming and removing of torrents feels quicker by changing the list immediately. Although these aren’t technically performance improvements, the user interface will feel a little more responsive. And now that even G1 cupcakes (optionally) have an auto-rotate using the accelerometer, that’s good news.

The new version can be downloaded from this site of course. It’s called 0.6.0 and looks something like this:

Just release; the new Transdroid version 0.5.2. Besides some minor bug fixes, it has these improvements:

• Better progress bars. Not only do they take up less screen space and have nice (and meaningful) colours – just like the Transmission web interface – but they also give a better indication of the real progress. Including on incomplete paused torrents.
• Resuming and pausing of all torrents now works for µTorrent as well.
• Adding of torrents via URL works again.
• Better error reporting. It should be able to recognise some common errors – like entering wrong credentials – and give you a nice message about it. Could still be improved though.
• Some search result settings introduced. You can set the number of results and the type of sorting.
• Shows you the Transdroid version number you are using in the title bar.

I believe this gets really close a a first non-beta version. Thanks to the testers so far. Please let me know if Transdroid works for you or if you’re missing any features.