Wednesday, December 28, 2016

BitTorrent for Mac OS 9 (!?!)

The Macintosh Garden forums had a bit of a Christmas surprise this year with news of a new BitTorrent client called MacTorrent. Not just any BitTorrent client, but one that runs on Mac OS 8-9.2.2 (a separate OS X version runs on 10.3-10.6.8). Somebody should tell these developers that the Classic Mac OS (the real Mac OS) already had its funeral and there's no reason to write useful and awesome applications for it. After all, the only reason Mac OS 9 isn't quite useful and awesome enough to run as an everyday system these days is a lack of useful and awesome modern applications. Or something like that.

In my limited testing so far, MacTorrent seems to work. It's bare at this early stage, but the developers are working on adding features such as magnet links in the future. Be part of the testing and give it a download. Download the .sit file labeled "Classic" for the Mac OS 8-9 version, and the .zip file labeled "PPC-OSX" for the OS X version.

If someone wrote an h.264 decoder for Youtube streaming on OS 9, I swear I'd switch back permanently.