DVASKELIS  Amazing little application "that just works." I imagine it'll get a bit more popular with Front Row in Leopard OS X 10.5.

I recently got a Mac Pro, and followed some Googled instructions on enabling Front Row. I hooked up an old KeySpan IR Receiver (and uninstalled the KeySpan software per Mira instructions), and with an Apple Remote I can happily control both Front Row and EyeTV as if I had an iMac with integrated IR.

No issues here, and surprisingly the free unregistered evaluation version is generously full functional! There are some limits without registering it, 10 application profiles (mappings of applications to remote buttons) and 6 launch menu items (simple launch of applications from the remote). But that's more than enough for Front Row and EyeTV.  
(Version 1.2.9)

DVASKELIS  "an underhanded way"? That seems a bit harsh.

For reference, the libtransmission license allows and promotes the idea that anyone can use the code as long as they say that they are using it, regardless if it's free or not.

From Xtorrent's About window:

"Xtorrent uses code from the libtransmission project."

From the Xtorrent's developer's post on the Transmission forum:

"First of all, I'd just like to give a quick thanks to the Transmission developers for building a solid foundational library. There's no end of choices out there, and I didn't make my choice lightly. Please take Xtorrent as a compliment. If you guys ever need some help of any sort, please feel free to give me a shout. We're all in this together. :) [...] The single change I've made was incorporating parts of the min-announce patch (that's sitting in Transmission's public trac, but hasn't been incorporated for whatever reason). I do promise that if I do end up making any other changes or additions to the core, I'll share them back with you guys, even though there's no obligation to do so. Whether or not anyone likes my code isn't up to me, alas. :)"  
(Version 1.0b3v29)

DVASKELIS  Actually, I was referring to Xtorrent respecting tracker min-announce intervals. That patch is in the public trac for libTransmission, and was incorporated by Xtorrent back in 1.0b1v13, but it's still not part of the Transmission 0.7 SVN builds for some reason.  
(Version 1.0b2v27)

DVASKELIS  This is a pretty amazing BitTorrent client. It's clearly not intended to be the all-singing all-dancing über-advanced client in the style of Azureus or BitRocket, but more a slim efficient client in the style of µTorrent. In other words, it's got enough features to be quite useful, generally resource-friendly, seems to be gaining improvements and has active development, and--impressively--a strikingly simple user-friendly interface.

This is the BitTorrent client you should load on your friend's Mac, the one that has no interest or patience for understanding how BitTorrent works or what to do with a torrent file. Simply put, you type in what you're looking for, a list of search results appears, and you click on which one you want to download. Oh, and if you just downloaded iTunes content, it'll automatically be added to your iTunes library. That's essentially all there is to it!

In the background, it's sniffing out some popular torrent sites for searches, including allowing you add your own, and then it automatically handles the download of the torrent file. It even works with BitTorrent sites it cannot search in the background, so if you can navigate to a web page with the built-in browser and download a torrent file, it'll automatically get it going for you.

Criticism of Xtorrent seems to come from two angles: the fact that it's clearly not going to be free from the developer for long, and that it uses libTransmission at its core. I won't review the developer or the fact that soon he will charge for the software. In a free society you can make your own decisions about the cost and value of the application. However, even though Xtorrent uses the libTransmission core of the controversial BitTorrent client Transmission, I think it's worth noting that Xtorrent should avoid all of the problems with some tracker sites banning the use of Transmission. This is because Xtorrent has incorporated the patches that make libTransmission compliant with BitTorrent standards. I have no good understanding why Transmission doesn't do the same.

I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next for Xtorrent. If it were to stay free, it would stand a strong chance to become "the µTorrent of Mac OS X"… but just a little different: maybe BitTorrent for the rest of us?

Pros:

- a slim and fast torrent client

- requires no understanding of how torrents work

- very easy to use: search and one-click download, that's it!

- strong basic torrent feature set (good performance, basic monitoring, scheduled bandwidth limits, multitracker support, seeding controls, drag-n-drop and automatic torrent download)

- iTunes integration

- public beta versions are free for now

Cons:

- not highly-configurable and lacks many advanced torrent optionsm, not an Azureus replacement

- soon to become nagware at $19 for the basic single-user license

- no RSS support (although the developer references a future RSS module)

- no selective downloading support to download only specific files within a torrent  
(Version 1.0b2v27)