BitTorrent Torque web app turn browser into a file-sharing hub

The company behind the popular torrent downloading software uTorrent has announced a new project called BitTorrent Torque, an alpha release set of tools that can be run from HTML5-compliant web browsers like Google Chrome, turning them into a fully-fledged file-sharing hub.

Lead developer Patrick Williams explains in the blog announcement that Torque works by providing a JavaScript hook to a custom BitTorrent backend. "Torque is a JavaScript interface to a custom torrent client that exposes all the power of BitTorrent to web developers.  Simply put, it allows anyone to utilize our powerful technology to create completely fresh and new experiences for users with just a couple lines of code."

There are currently two extensions available, the first (pictured below) is Paddle Over, which integrates drag and drop file transfers via social networking and sharing as well as other computers. The second extension is OneClick, which is currently available for Google Chrome and is used to convert a typical torrent download into a simple to manage standard in-browser download.

Future Torque extensions will further demonstrate the potential capabilities of its APIs and will eventually provide video streaming, file transcoding and antivirus scanning, among other functions. Right now bugs are expected as it's currently an alpha build, but as time passes its creators hope to increase functionality.

"Torque is both an underlying, fully fledged torrent client, as well as a simple JavaScript interface designed to make the technology as accessible as possible," Williams told TorrentFreak. "Our hope is that the development and use of torrent technologies can scale the same way that a torrent swarm does, and this is our initial effort towards that goal."

The software is still in its infancy, but with web apps gaining more functionality due to CSS3, HTML5 and JavaScript maturing it has resulted in developers being able to create web apps that run across multiple OS ecosystems, saving them resources, time and money.

Adobe releases Flash-like HTML5 design tool Adobe Edge

Adobe Systems today announced the first public preview release of Adobe Edge, a new HTML5 web motion and interaction design tool available for free on labs.adobe.com for Mac and Windows. Web designers can use the tool to bring animations, similar to those created in Flash Professional, to websites using standards likes HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Because HTML5 is a moving standard, Adobe says it is adopting an open development methodology for Adobe Edge. For now, this means the company is releasing the software on the Adobe Labs website sooner than it would during a normal development process in order to allow user feedback to help shape the final product. Adobe Edge is not yet even considered in beta. It is being designed as a fast and lightweight professional-grade tool that complements Adobe's existing Web tools, such as Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5, Adobe Flash Professional CS5.5, and Adobe Flash Builder 4.5.

The preview enables you to add motion to existing HTML documents without hampering design integrity of CSS-based layouts, and it also allows you to create visually rich content from scratch, using familiar drawing tools that produce HTML elements styled with CSS3. You can import standard Web graphics assets such as SVG, PNG, JPG, and GIF files and style them using CSS3. The design stage utilizes WebKit to enable design, preview, and manipulation of content. The timeline feature lets you define and customize motion applied to HTML elements. Content created with Edge is designed to work on modern browsers including those on Android, BlackBerry Playbook, iOS , HP webOS, and other smartphone mobile devices as well as Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer 9.

"Over the last year Adobe has delivered on several significant HTML5 milestones including contributions to jQuery, submitting code to WebKit, and enhanced HTML5 output in Creative Suite 5.5," Paul Gubbay, vice president of Design and Web Engineering at Adobe, said in a statement. "Now, with Adobe Edge, we're taking our HTML5 tooling to a whole new level and look forward to getting some really useful feedback from the community over the next few months, as we refine the product."