The popular open-source, cross-platform BitTorrent client, Transmission, today received its first major update in more than a year and a half. As first noted by Softpedia, the surprise update makes the free of charge app fully compatible with the user interface on Macs running OS X 10.9 Mavericks and later.
Transmission can now trim potential URIs from clipboard and supports downloading from HTTP servers on OS X El Capitan. Transmission’s daemon, web client, Qt client and GTK+ client have also received various fixes. All told, there are over 50 changes in this release of Transmission.
Across platforms, Transmission now does a better job at torrent renaming with a common prefix. Additionally, the refreshed application now supports a bunch of cryptographic backends such as PolarSSL, CyaSSL and WolfSSL.
Transmission’s Qt client has gained improvements, too, among them better handling of magnet links and a new contextual menu on the Files tab of the Torrent Properties dialog.
As of this version, Macs with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or earlier are no longer supported. Be that as it may, I am particularly glad that Transmission to this date continues to be free of in-app advertising, unlike its rival uTorrent which is full of adware.
Transmission 2.9 changelog
Here’s everything that has been improved and fixed in Transmission 2.9.
All platforms:
- Fix renaming torrent files with common prefix
- Fix some more thread safety bugs in the tr_list datatype
- Fix infinite loop when removing torrent data
- Add support for CyaSSL/WolfSSL and PolarSSL cryptographic backends; bump OpenSSL minimum to v0.9.7
- Initial CMake build system support
- Many improvements to support Windows builds with MSVS and MinGW; drop XP/2003 support, only Vista and up now
- Allow building against system UTP and DHT libraries
- Fix several memory leaks and buffer overflows
- Support miniupnpc API v14
- Fix “prefetch-enabled” value type in settings.json (boolean instead of integer)
- Fix some issues discovered by static analysis (cppcheck, coverity)
- Fix invalid JSON encoding for non-printable characters
- Fix multi-threaded locale use when encoding/decoding JSON data
- Fix encrypted communication with libevent 2.1+
- Prevent completed pieces modification by webseeds
- Require absolute paths in RPC requests
- Fix and unify torrent origin display in GTK+, Qt and web clients
- Fix crash on session shutdown (evdns_getaddrinfo_cancel)
- Retry if RPC server fails to bind to specified address
- Improve error checking on metadata retrieval
- Improve UTF-8 validity checking (merge changes from LLVM)
- Don’t build transmission-cli by default (it’s long deprecated)
Mac client:
- UI fixes for OS X 10.9+
- Trim potential URIs from clipboard
- Allow downloading files from http servers (not https) on OS X 10.11+
- Change Sparkle Update URL to use HTTPS instead of HTTP (addresses Sparkle vulnerability)
- Fix global options popover layout
- Fix building with Xcode 7+
- Drop OS X 10.6 support
GTK+ client
- Fix overshoot and undershoot indicators display with GTK+ 3.16+ in main window
- Don’t require DISPLAY if started with –version argument
Qt client
- Improve performance in Torrent Properties dialog for torrents with lots of files
- Prevent entering file renaming mode with mouse double-click
- Add context menu on files tab of Torrent Properties dialog resembling that of Mac client
- Remove torrent file from watch directory even if “show options dialog” is not set
- Use theme-provided icons in system tray and About dialog
- Fix initial watch directory scan
- Improve filter bar look and feel; lots of other small visual fixes; RTL layout fixes
- Show message to the user when duplicate torrent is being added
- Improve magnets handling in main window
- Display notifications via tray icon if D-Bus is not available
- Show notice on top of filtered torrents list; clear whole filter on notice double-click
- Add proper compiler flags to indicate C++11 use
- Fix translation files loading
- Add Chinese (China), German, Indonesian, Italian (Italy), Korean, Polish (Poland),
- Ukrainian translations; update existing translations
Daemon
- Run as service on Windows when in background mode
- Rework directory watching, add support for native mechanisms on BSD/Darwin (kqueue) and Windows (ReadDirectoryChanges?)
- Don’t make assumptions of remote path validity in transmission-remote
Web client
- Content Security Policy enhancements
- Enable “resume now” for queued torrents
- Mark appropriate fields in preferences dialog as HTML5 number fields
- Update to jQuery 1.11.2, jQueryUI 1.11.4; use jQueryUI menus instead of custom ones
Again, this is the first major update to this free of charge, cross-platform BitTorrent client in nearly two years (the previous update is dated May 18, 2014).
I’m glad they’re keeping this awesome app alive. It’s very fast, reliable, feature-packed and better than BitTorrent’s official client or the ad-infested uTorrent, if you ask me.
You can download Transmission at the official website.
What’s your favorite BiTorrent client for the Mac?
Source: Softpedia