uTorrent Opens Up Apps, Starts Developer Challenge | Hacker News Reader

uTorrent Opens Up Apps, Starts Developer Challenge

blog.bittorrent.com

32 pointspyronicide15 comments

"apps" are the new "extensions" which were the new "plugins" which replaced "skins" which supplanted "themes". Or something like that.

How long before have to have this conversation:

"Our product needs to support user customization. We need apps!" "We have an extension framework." "But that's not apps!"

From http://www.utorrent.com/labs/griffin

The Griffin project introduces a web-based extensions framework for µTorrent to allow for easy extensibility by 3rd party developers through a simple API ... What we came up with is a web-based extensions framework where "Apps" which consist only of HTML and Javascript can be added to the client and displayed using an embedded browser window.

µTorrent (many torrent clients infact) have long had their own web interfaces, for managing downloads thru a browser from afar.

It sounds like these Apps/Extensions are simply a tidier bundling of the long present webgui [webgui.zip ?]. Technically, I bet all this was possible already, but this likely makes the use more conventional, supported, & easier to setup.

Must everything become a platform?

You have a good point. However, when you have the number of users they have, some interesting things might happen that wouldn't if they tried to develop all the new features themselves.

Once you get down to it, all code is written on top of a platform. Why not use the wisdom of crowds and open it up to everyone so that they can contribute their ideas?

I see the argument, and no doubt it'll be pretty successful, but a large reason why I liked uTorrent is because it was fast and lean. More layers of abstraction tends to lead to slower performance.

I wonder if they're trying to compete with Azureus / Vuze with this?

:| It's the "why no love for the hardcore gamer?" lament all over again. People who care are a minority.

Yes, I want for example that my context menu becomes a platform of sorts, where they can show me good offers on any word selected in any software I use!

We can make it optionally purple and add bananas, if desired.

Man, now I want a context menu that gives me bananas! Brilliant.

How about a context menu that drives you bananas? I'm sure I can find one of those...

/me is glad I bought bananas a while ago. * nom nom nom * .

When you run out of useful features, generalizing is easier than stopping.

I can see it now:

Would you like to install WeatherBug uTorrent edition along with this program?

What's an example of a useful thing you can write?

Probably a web server which stores data in a distributed (and fault tolerant) way in all these clients. There will be no central point of failure. This will be really worthy of being called "cloud" as opposed to a bunch of servers put together in a farm.

In addition to the advantage of being fault tolerant, a system like this will be able to balance the load in such a way that the website never goes down in case of a traffic surge.

Another benefit (or not, depending on how you see it) will be that a website hosted in a torrent cloud will be difficult to take down by anyone.

Some interesting ideas ....

- Make it easy for people to get TED talks via. BitTorrent with recommendations

- Share your torrents with friends in a Blippy style feed

- Make something feel good, like a map with the general locations of all the peers you're connected to.

Integrated search of popular torrent websites.

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