News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

December 17, 2007

software

Clutch brings the power of a WebUI to Transmission

Posted Dec. 17, ’07, 11:10 AM PT by Aayush Arya
Category | Software

Clutch.pngOne of the best torrent clients for Windows is µTorrent and it has one outstanding feature that Transmission lacks, the WebUI. Basically, it allows you to leave µTorrent running on your home computer and then access it from any Internet-connected location in the world with just the help of a web browser (unless that browser happens to be Internet Explorer). I use it on my Mac through CrossOver and it works like a charm.

The makers of Clutch, Malcolm Jarvis, Dave Perrett and Kendall Hopkins, realized what a useful feature this is and decided to bring it to Transmission and they’ve hit a home run. All you have to do is download Clutch from the official website, install it on your Mac, and run it. It places a new item in the menu bar and, once set up, starts the Transmission Daemon and the WebUI. Note that it is independent of Transmission itself. It just uses the daemon which is bundled with the app.

Clutch running in Safari
After that, you can find out the address you need to browse to from the Preferences window; visiting that URL in any browser launches the web-based interface, which looks almost exactly like the desktop application itself (the screenshot above shows it running in Safari).

In my basic testing, which included downloading a file from a private tracker and seeing whether it completed successfully or not (yes, I know I can be very thorough sometimes), it passed with flying colors. The app weighs in at 2.4MB and is available for the very low price of free. By way of feature requests for the future, the only missing feature I can think of is integration with Transmission. If they can implement that, they have a winner on their hands. Wait, who am I kidding! They already do, as far as I am concerned.

A tiny little update: For some weird reason best known to the creators of the universe application, the default download folder for all downloads is somewhere within the application bundle. So, unless you change your preferences the first time you use the application (tiny little gear icon in the bottom left corner), you’ll be hunting for the downloaded files once you’ve spent three days downloading something. Moral of the story is, change the download location to something a little more convenient, like the ~/Downloads folder, for example. Thanks to gand for the reminder!


3 Comments

Goobimama said:

Nice one Aayush! I'm pretty sure that by the time uTorrent for mac is released (god knows when that is), Transmission will kick it's ass right back into 'the Hell where Jobs gives little water to...'

December 17, 2007 12:25 PM
gand said:

Just guess where it save files.
Configure preferences by clicking on the little wheel at bottom left of the browser window, otherwhise default location is inside application bundle.

December 17, 2007 2:09 PM
Aayush Arya Author Profile Page said:

Thank you for reminding me of this! I had every intention to mention it but it somehow slipped through when I was typing up the entry. :)

December 17, 2007 8:40 PM

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