We’ve always strived to make the BitTorrent client simple and useful, basing our design philosophy around this core ideal. At the same time, we recognize there are many features that may enhance your experience – by choice.
The solution? Apps. Available today for the first time in a new release candidate build of the BitTorrent Mainline client (the 7.1 Release Candidate version available below the download button on the homepage, or here), we’re introducing apps to provide a flexible, easy way to add and extend BitTorrent functionality, discover new media/games/software, and lots of other cool things at your leisure.
While only available today as a release candidate, over the next several weeks we will issue the production release to roll it out to all BitTorrent Mainline users.
Apps for BitTorrent are built on a JavaScript-based extension framework and make it easy for users to discover and download digital media without ever leaving the client. To kick off this limited release, we’re launching with 11 apps, ranging from useful to fun, enabling you to create a personalized BitTorrent experience by adding new features and services. For example, add virus protection with Virus Guard (powered by BitDefender), or clean up mislabeled songs in your playlist with TuneUp. See a map of all the peers in your swarm with uMap or organize all your torrents and downloaded files with uBrowse. Even share your torrents with TorrentTweet. More apps are coming soon.
The best part – we encourage all third-party developers to write and publish new apps, meaning that the breadth of creative ideas of apps to come is unlimited. And if you’re a developer yourself, you can now write an app available to BitTorrent’s millions of users using the SDK Developer tools.
The apps platform on BitTorrent Mainline 7.1 is completely open, and allows for easy extensibility by independent developers through a simple API. Partners and independent developers can access all the functionality of the client and offer a simple and more integrated way for consumers to find and download different types of content as well as integrate with external services that add new functionality. In addition, the SDK developer tools and all the Apps we release from BitTorrent are free software, released with a three-clause BSD license.
Apps are built with JavaScript, the standard language used for Web-based tools and services. They can interact with other Web services and Web content to create rich media experiences for users, and use HTML and CSS for rendering.
Our goal is to provide our users with easy access to quality content and services to improve the experience of downloading and sharing content. This is our first step (of many to come) of our journey into the world of apps – stay tuned. We continue to be excited by the potential and look forward to your feedback!
-Simon-
