Avalanche BitTorrent Downloader for Gnome is a BitTorrent download client written in Python which wraps a clean, useable GUI around the standard BitTorrent distribution.
Avalanche is a GUI wrapper around the BitTorrent package, designed to adhere to Gnome's HIG and as such be easy and intuitive to use without cutting back on feedback. The main interface allows the user to see the rate at which the torrent is both uploading and downloading, and the progress in terms of the amount of the torrent downloaded and a time estimate until the torrent is complete.
At the moment I feel I have compacted the main window into a state where nothing should be added or subtracted, pawning off information that doesn't need to be displayed all the time, along with a couple of options, into a properties window. The bulk of the properties window is borrowed from my BitTorrent Property Page for Nautilus with extra information pertaining to the download state.
I mainly wrote a this application to fill up time I really should be using to do other things, if I'm being completely honest. On the more technical side I had never used the PyGTK bindings before and so this was also a learning experience.
Why not stick with existing clients such as gnome-bt? I was happily using gnome-bt, however there was a little bug which caused the file chooser it bought up when resuming a download to only allow the selection of files and not that of folders, which set me off poking around in the source. I ended up hacking it in there and left the cleaning up for later. When I came back I got a litte carried away and decided that the UI should be based around the Progress Windows section of the Gnome HIG and ended up starting pretty much from scratch.
It is corny, I know, but the most obvious name—gnome-bt—is taken, so not feeling in a particularly creative mood I consulted a thesaurus.
Avalanche can be downloaded at avalanche-0.1.tar.bz2. It's currently on it's first release, v0.1 "Release Early, Release Often", and should be considered Beta quality software. However, it should be stable as it is really just a simple GUI which wraps around BitTorrent.
Before you can use Avalanche you will need a Python installation, PyGTK, python-gnome, python-glade and BitTorrent.
At the moment it's not so much an installation as a collection of files. To start up, execute Avalanche.py and set the --url flag to the URL of the BitTorrent 'metainfo' file, including the file:// preffix. The other flags are sent untouched to BitTorrent so all the standard arguments will work.
There are many things that need doing. An incomplete list:
If you come accross any issues feel free to report them to me