Blog of the Bittorrent Applet

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Seeders and leechers in the download UI, and other news

Good news!
We recently updated the download window in order to show the number of seeders and leechers. (The ones which are currently connected to your client, to be precise.)
You should see the figures if you leave your mouse over the little led icon on the bottom right corner of the window.

Although we're happy about adding that feature (that was the second most voted open issue!), we think the visualization we're presently using is not the best way to present such information.

The download window is quite small and screen estate is scarce, but we thought about a couple other alternatives.

option 1: bottom right corner
The numbers are always visible right near the led icon. Seeders and Leechers are abbreviated.

option 2: top
Numbers appear on top of the page the third time you click on the statistics area (just like upload/download stats). They are not visible by default.

Which one do you prefer? Have you got any other great idea?
Don't hesitate to let us know!

Mock-ups were created with Balsamiq Mockups, an awesome tool for UI prototyping (and one of the few outstanding AIR applications out there).

If you want to play with the original mock-up, you can download it from here. If you want to send us back the results of your experiments, mail them back to us -_^.

As a side note, here are some other updates we hope you'll appreciate:
  • We fixed a bug in the download code that made the applet attempt to establish connections on the wrong ports. Download performance should be better now :)
  • We added support for the "key" announce parameter, as suggested by Marco Túlio Pires from dattebayo.com.
  • We signed all the applets using a brand new certificate, and that's why your browser may have presented you with one of those cryptic security-related message windows (read more about certificates)

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