BitTorrent is asking those who actively use its popular uTorrent client to test drive a new version. Based on a posting at the official uTorrent forum, the pre-release 3.1 Alpha build provides both behind-the-scenes tweaks and drag-and-drop support for iOS, Android, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Breaking down the complete list of updates, a BitTorrent forum administrator laid out other new, fixed and changed highlights.
In addition to the new drag-in option accessible via a "Devices" node, the 3.1 build includes a BEP33 DHT scrape. According to a BitTorrent developer document, that particular BEP "specifies an extension to the BitTorrent DHT (BEP 5) to support scrapes via distributed counting based on bloom filters."
"Scrapes are an important part of the BitTorrent ecosystem as they allow users to assess the state of a torrent and clients to determine which swarm to select next in their seeding queue, without having to participate in the swarm first," explained BitTorrent.
The company purports the new build also fixes previously reported problems, such as downloads not showing up in users' RSS feed views and sporadic invalid DHT responses. Other changes include a default speed tab, disk I/O optimization and quicker torrent pane update speeds courtesy of various UI tweaks.
The original uTorrent 3.0 was released in June and added a streaming option, drag-and-drop sending and a comment/rating system. Earlier this year, BitTorrent announced it had reached 100 million active users per month with around 20 million people checking in each day. (via TorrentFreak)
