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.

Download of the Week: uTorrent 3.0 beta

The beta of uTorrent 3.0 was officially released today. This update to the popular BitTorrent client introduces a wide range of new features and improvements that have been tested in the last few months, including the option to rate and comment on torrent files added to uTorrent, which apparently have been among the most requested in the uTorrent "Idea Bank" website and should give users a better idea of the quality of the files they’re downloading.

uTorrent 3.0 beta adds a new portable mode to run the BitTorrent client without installation as well as the option to stream media torrents while they are being downloaded. It also added the newest version of their remote access functionality to the app, so you can control your downloads from any computer or mobile phone.

Another interesting new option is the super-simple ability to share torrent and torrent links with others. A "drop files to send" area in the bottom left-hand corner lets users create a torrent and start seeding it automatically by simply dragging and dropping files to the uTorrent interface. Users will get a link to send to their friends directly. Or even if you don't create the torrent file, you can always right-click any download and select Send Torrent to share it. There's an option to bundle uTorrent with the shared link to make the process easier on less experienced users.

Besides all this the user interface has been revamped and a "simplified view" was added, all while keeping its characteristic small footprint at around 550Kb. You can download the beta in its 32-bit or 64-bit variants, although the developers warn that the 64-bit version "may be considerably buggier." For now it is only available to Windows users.