WIZARDLING  Willing to try and discredit anyone who dares say a bad word about Transmission, huh? It says something about a community when all they can do is attack, censor, and slander others. What a credit you are to the Transmission project. Still, the behaviour of certain Transmission developers isn't far removed from this anyway... Maybe they welcome this sort of BS?

Boy do I regret visiting MacUpdate again *disgustedly wanders off to friendlier and far saner parts of the 'net, where - don't worry - I plan to STAY this time*  
(Version 1.50b2)

WIZARDLING  It's not the software I'm 'emotional' about at this point. It's the BS. Try labelling me a troll in the comp.sys.mac.* newsgroups, the IOMUG mailing list, or any one of a dozen other groups where you actually have to a) be able to define 'troll' and b) somehow manage to damage an established reputation. Because funnily enough slander is a lot easier when the person is an unknown quantity. So I'd just like to see how well BS like this works where people know me. Call me curious... *disgustedly cancels email notification of replies to this thread* *PLONK*  
(Version 1.42)

WIZARDLING  Charles doesn't know what a troll is (which is pretty amazing). Because if trolling is trying to get support for buggy software (and generally being told it's only me/it's all my fault/just flat out ignored) then I am _absolutely_ a troll. In fact I _welcome_ troll status in that case. Of course that fails to meet all known definitions for 'troll', but *shrug* whatever. I'm not going to try and make this a lesson in geek jargon.  
(Version 1.42)

WIZARDLING  Call me a troll all you like Charles, the fact is the problem exists for me and though I was occasionally a wee bit testy in person on IRC, I was very polite on the forums and made sure to include positive comments in my last posting - which was removed and for which I was banned.

Oh, and my review IS of the stable version of 1.42 released 24/12/08, thank you very much.  
(Version 1.42)

WIZARDLING  No worries, and I know what you mean about µTorrent's UI - it's like someone in love with Outlook Express designed a BitTorrent client :-D

As for routers - preaching to the converted :-) Unfortunately I think it's only us geeks who bother configuring things like bandwidth management. Witness the sheer number of unsecured WiFi access points - people just plug their router in and if it works, they never touch it again. I've some friends in the US who - no joke - have never paid for their own internet connection in over three years now... Amazing :-D  
(Version 1.42)

WIZARDLING  Ah, you are right - µTorrent's developers should be clear about their lack of testing on PPC Macs. They used only Intel Macs to develop and test this port, you see. They say all that in the Forums, but that's hardly making it easily accessible information. Personally I think they shouldn't distribute a build for a platform they cannot test.

As for Tomato Torrent - it may be old and light on features, but it certainly works well, even on old G3 Macs running 10.3.9 :-) It's just a shame it doesn't support partial download of multi-file torrents. If it did I'd say the hell with Transmission and µTorrent, even if they've better and more modern UIs.  
(Version 1.42)

WIZARDLING  Are you on a PPC Mac? That's the only time I've heard µTorrent will crash all the time. It's been very stable IME. Very buggy and feature-incomplete also, but it's only crashed once for me. So don't try and make out I'm some kind of fanboy (I'd love to know how I could be when the Mac beta version of µTorrent is the first time I've ever used µTorrent on any OS). But if somehow Transmission is faster for you than µTorrent, Tomato Torrent, or the official BitTorrent client - well then, you'd should continue to use it. I won't be because I've found the opposite after weeks of testing and switching back and forth. No need to take my differing experience personally, you know.  
(Version 1.42)

WIZARDLING  Transmission is also slow by comparison.  
(Version 3.3.0.1)

WIZARDLING  Fast, _much_ faster downloads than I could get with Transmission. On par with Tomato Torrent.

Unfortunately (and understandably for a beta of a brand new Mac port) the UI needs work, features are limited, and there are many bugs - including one particularly annoying one where you cannot selectively download part of a multi-file torrent even if you've more than enough space for just that part. Right clicking also does not select an item so I'm constantly bringing up a contextual menu for the wrong item.

Still, µTorrent shows great promise and is an excellent effort for an app so new to the Mac. Once the bugs are ironed out I can see it replacing Transmission as my main BitTorrent client.  
(Version 0.9.0.4b)

WIZARDLING  For the longest time I used only Transmission and I had assumed that my very slow and yo-yoing download speeds were the fault of my ISP. I thought this was as good as it got with BitTorrent. Boy was I ever wrong.

Approx. a month ago I tried out the brand new Mac port of µTorrent. Even being very beta quality software it is on average 10x faster than Transmission at getting torrents downloaded. I switched back and forth for several weeks between the two clients using the exact same torrents - it's no fluke. I even tried the old official BitTorrent client and the ageing Tomato Torrent - both were MUCH faster than Transmission and on par with µTorrent.

Now if it was just speed I might even stick with Transmission while µTorrent's bugs are ironed out. Transmission's UI and feature set are so much better, and Tomato Torrent - which works well - cannot selectively download part of a multi-file torrent. That feature is also buggy in µTorrent.

But sadly Transmission began a couple months ago to allocate all it's upload bandwidth to just one torrent 95% of the time, with predictable negative performance results for the neglected torrents. This has made Transmission almost impossible to use, and the refusal by the developers to even continue to discuss the issue does not inspire confidence in an eventual resolution.

As a result my recommendation has to be to avoid Transmission for the foreseeable future - and that's a damn shame :-(  
(Version 1.42)

JAMIE KAHN GENET  This is one severly buggy piece of software…

Well, I thought I'd give Konfabulator another try now it's owned by Yahoo. Last time I tried it I was unimpressed with it's slow speed on my G3 iMacs, and the CPU meter, rather ironically, had a memory leak

This time around bad things began happening from the word go. The Digital Clock widget refused to display, and if I tried accessing it's prefs from the Konfab menu I got a dialogue box saying no prefs were available. Worse - that dialogue refused to accept input - it would not close till I quit the Konfabulator app from it's menu.

Then I tried seeing what the simple background pref looked like when I pressed F8. After setting that Konfabulator no longer responded to F8. Not until I quit and restarted it, and set it back to the default background would F8 show the Konfabulator screen.

Then I tried accessing the PIM widget (which I _thought_ I'd seen pop up briefly the first time I ran Konfabulator after installing it). Nada - nothing. No preference access either. Not even a dialogue that wouldn't close. Nothing.

Still, just in case I thought things couldn't get any worse I tried accessing iChat Bezel widget's prefs. Once again - nada, nothing, no response.

I next tried setting the Weather widget to my closest town - Tauranga Harbour, New Zealand. Miracle of miracles it worked… until I later quit and restarted Konfabulator. Now it refuses to show my weather, yet Palo Alto and another city(that's NOT close to me) in NZ - Auckland - displays fine, weather wise.

Lastly the CPU meter's LED style red numbers show nothing. But as there's ZERO useful documentation or info I have no clue what might usually display there, anyway.

In short, Konfabulator used to work a year ago on this G3 iMac. Now it's so broken I'm put off trying any third party widgets. I can't believe there was so little testing done

Oh, and maybe some user out there can help me with a query of mine (cause there's ZERO help provided with Konfabulator): with utterly useless broken widgets like PIM - how can I quit them? I know I can quit the non-functional Digital Clock with a control click of it's name in the gear menu, but that doesn't work with the useless PIM. As it doesn't display, and won't respond, how the heck can I quit the damn thing? Do I need to delete my prefs EVERY time I run into a poorly written and poorly tested widget? I suppose I could just delete it from my HD, but given how poorly Konfabulator is doing so far, I'm not sure I want to add to it's troubles.

BTW - this absurd trial took place on a 500MHz G3 with 512MB RAM.  
(Version 2.1.1)

JAMIE KAHN GENET  KoolClip on my iMac running 10.3.9 fails to save the clipboards across restarts :-( It it were not for this showstopping (and rather glaring) bug I'd definitely be using it, as it's a nice, simple (unlike the bloatware, Dock hogging CopyPaste) multiple clipboard menu.

Please fix this awful bug so I can use this lovely piece of freeware. I'd even pay a shareware fee if only it WORKED! *sigh*  
(Version 2.1)