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Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s Summer of Mac Gems series. Each business day until the middle of August 2008, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.
BitTorrent has become the peer-to-peer protocol of choice for transferring large files quickly. There are plenty of clients for OS X, but Transmission Project’s Transmission 1.22 has a lot of things going for it: it’s fast, it’s extremely lightweight, and-even though it’s available for a variety of platforms-it behaves just as you’d expect a Mac program to.
Don’t be fooled by its simple, intuitive interface: it has plenty of power. You can set up Transmission to watch a particular folder for torrent files and begin downloads automatically, set upload and download speed restrictions globally or for individual files, and even configure the program to prefer encrypted peers.