Hacker News Reader

Comment by viktorelofsson | Hacker News Reader

If you want to try a client with v2 (and v1+v2 hybrid) support, I've just released PicoTorrent v0.20 [0] based on Rasterbar-libtorrent 2.0 :)

[0] https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent/releases/tag/v0.2...

View on HN

Nice. If anyone is wondering if they should try this, picotorrent is probably the most lightweight GUI torrent client for windows (no linux/mac version).

What are you using for the GUI layer, and what's your stance on accessibility? The fact it's Windows only gives me hope.

I'm using wxWidgets, so it's the Win32 API at the lowest layer. For accessibility I want to make it support the NVDA screen reader which I think would make it support other readers as well :)

wxWidgets is a decent choice. Not all of its controls are accessible though. Most infamously, the wxHTML control (wx's own HTML engine) isn't accessible, but the web view control (using the OS's web browsing engine) is accessible if you futz around at the native layer to force the keyboard focus into the right place. Also, on Windows, the list view control is accessible but the data view control is not. Frustratingly, the opposite is the case on Mac and (I think) GTK.

I suggest you test with Narrator rather than NVDA. Disclosure: I work on the Narrator team at Microsoft. But that's not why I say this. The reason is that NVDA and JAWS have some ugly hacks that they can use to make some GUI implementations (particularly using Win32 with GDI for graphics) accessible even if they're not accessible by design. For details, do some searching on the term "off-screen model". Narrator doesn't have this, so if your product works with Narrator, you know it's really accessible.

That's really valuable, thank you!

Thank You. Will definitely check it out given uTorrent on Windows does't get much update anymore.

I want to ask, were Rasterbar-Libtorrent and Libtorrent always the same thing? I thought they were different implementation? Did they merge or did memory serve me wrong.

I couldn't Google anything useful so I just ask. In the era of streaming It has been far too long since I look at anything BT.

There are two libraries called libtorrent - Rasterbar-libtorrent (the one in this discussion, made by arvidn) and rakshasa-libtorrent (made by rakshasa).

Arh... that is why I keep getting confused with the naming. Thank You.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com