Its been a over six months since we last saw an update to everyone’s favorite BitTorrent client. The uTorrent team has released version 1.8 of their BitTorrent client, with significant improvements and updates.

Added the already pent up excitement about the new uTorrent there is also a word that a Mac version of uTorrent is on the way.. Good news for all Mac users out there.. But I feel that a stable Mac build is quite a few months away.

We’ve had to wait for quite a while for this release since the last stable build 1.7.7 was released way back in January. A lot of work has been done in these seven months though, and the list of changes and additions that were implemented is “absolutely massive”, to quote Firon from the release announcement..

One of the most significant updates in the latest version of uTorrent is that it comes with built in IPv6 support, which improves connectivity and thus performance. The only problem is that IPv6 is still not common, and we have to wait for it to take over IPv4. Other new features are better Windows Firewall registration on Vista and improved distribution of new connections across torrents.

According to uTorrent developer Greg Hazel since 1.8 is finally out, the uTorrent team is going to be more focused to get a Mac OSX version ready on which they have been working already for the past year. According to Greg a private Alpha of uTorrent  for the Mac should be out in a few weeks.

uTorrent 1.8 can be downloaded from the uTorrent website, and the list of changes, improvements and additions is available in the forum thread announcing the release.

Way to go uTorrent! Its time to upgrade one of my favorite pieces of software. What are your thoughts on the latest and greatest version of uTorrent? I guess the Mac users are waiting to get their hands on uTorrent for Mac as soon as possible.

Via Torrentfreak

If you are a Windows user, and your favorite browser happens to have a name Firefox 3, here is neat hack which you can use to tweak your Firefox install for maximum speeds and improved efficiency.. Don’t fret because this hack is really simple and doesn’t involve anything more than a couple of minutes of your time. Well I’m going to discuss about a freeware called FireTune, from Totalidea Software, which can give your Firefox browser some shots of adrenaline.

As you might already know most Firefox hacks involve messy fiddling up with options in about:config and there are a gazillion things than can go wrong and mess up with your Firefox install. Instead of dealing with all that mess, Firetune simply asks you a few questions about your computer and connection speed, then automatically configures Firefox for optimal performance—in seconds (No, Seriously!!).

FireTune does not muck up with Firefox executable file, or any other binary file, so you don’t have to worry that it’s going to turn the browser to a toast.

To get started download Firetune from here. Shut down all instances of Firefox and then fire up Firetune. It would be a good idea to back up your original configuration before you make any changes…

Now that you have backed up the configuration, select whether you have a fast Internet connection and a fast computer, or not. If you have at least a 1.5-GHz processor, 512MB or more of memory, and a reasonably fast broadband connection, select Fast Computer/Fast Connection.

Now click on the tab that says, “Other Optimizations”. Check the checkbox that says “Enable some performance tweaks common to all configurations’”.

Now click on the tab that says, “Other Useful Settings”. Check the checkbox that says “Optimize Firefox Memory Usage” 

That is it, now click the Tune It! Button and fire up Firefox once the tuning is done.

Browse through pages that usually used to be slow earlier. I’m sure you will see substantial improvements in the speeds. I’m sure you will find the overall experience of using Firefox much better, not that it was bad earlier!..

Now you must be wondering why many browsers are inherently built slow.. My guess is that coders build it for the people using the slowest internet connection, so that Firefox doesn’t render pages partially for the users.

But because you are a Dailyapps reader, I’m sure you want the fastest speed you can possibily get from your Firefox. That makes it exactly right for you to try out Firetune and give your Firefox a Nitro boost!

P.S. I’ve been a long time fan of Fasterfox, but I abandoned it in favor of Firetune because it doesn’t work with Firefox 3 at the moment.

Download Firetune

Pingdom is the best website uptime monitoring service you will ever find. With it you can have the status of your website checked in regular intervals and they can be as small as one minute. More importantly the checks are not from just one location, in fact they have seven servers in the United States, one in Singapore, one in Australia, one in India, two in England, one in Holland, and two in Sweden. All of them will be monitoring the uptime of your website every single minute.

Setting up your site in Pingdom is a simple 3 step process that offers variety of configuration options as you can see in the screenshots below..

As you can see from the screenshots you can be notified by EMail and/or SMS Text messages. In my experience so far, the email notifications work wonderfully and the basic plan comes with 20 SMS messages per month. Receiving text messages can be extremely useful when you don’t have immediate access to your email and this has proved to be quite beneficial to me in the past.

Once you have, had Pingdom running tests on your site for a while, you will see a plethora of useful and easy to read reports. Take for example the graph below which shows how fast DailyApps responds to you when you try to access it.

If you have a website or you are planning to have one soon, Pingdom is a must have for you. I’d say a must have tool for every webmaster.

The Giveaway

Well during the birthday celebrations of DailyApps we have 25 Basic Accounts for a year (Valued at 119.40$ each) of Pingdom to giveaway to you guys. All you have to do is follow the instructions below.

1. Go to our signup page: https://www.pingdom.com/signup/
2. Select service type Pingdom Basic.
3. Select payment type Yearly (which is worth $119.40)
4. Enter dailyapps1y into the promotional code field and press the “apply code” button. If there are any free accounts left on this code you will get a message that it is a valid code and you will see the price on the page change to $0.00.
5. Fill in your account information below. (The cell phone is just there for SMS alerts.)
6. Check the Pingdom ToS at the bottom.
7. Press the “sign up now” button.

Please note that the promotional codes will get used up on first come first serve basis. So better hurry up now..

There was a time when browsers were nothing but simple tools that allowed us to browse web pages.. Remember the good old days of Netscape anyone? Well these days browsers are trying to be the center of everything you do on your computer. Almost every service is now available online and the browser plays an important role in the growth of these services.

Social networking is a rage these days, and browsers like Flock are full fledged social media powerhouses connecting you to every popular social networking site. No wonder Flock is called the Social media browser.

Flock had earlier release a green version of its browser called the Flock – Eco Edition, and now it has come up with a similar branding to bring Flock Gloss and it aims to bring fashion and entertainment right into the browser, and quite unsurprisingly it is the first browser to do so.

Have a look at the screenshot below and you will see that it is all pink, and complete with all sorts of glossy effects.

Flock Gloss is the original Flock plus the additional features that are related to entertainment and fashion. Flock Gloss automagically pulls in feeds from many popular fashion/entertainment sites such as InStyle, TMZ, ThisNext, PopSugar and Glam among others.

In addition to the feeds, you can also access media streams of fashion interviews, red carpet events, style shows and more directly from the browser’s Media Bar, and you can also easily communicate and share content with your friends as it was in the original Flock.

If you are a Fashion and Entertainment freak then maybe Flock Gloss is a perfect match for you.. Don’t blame me if you fall in love with pink!! ..

Over the past couple of years, the BitTorrent market has been dominated by the likes of uTorrent, Azureus and BitComet, with the three of them taking up as much as 90% marketshare. With such sort of dominance these apps we’ve not seen many alternative solutions in the past few years.

Common sense says that it might be next to impossible for a new app in this field to play catch up with the major three, but the newcomer on field Halite (named after a mineral) might just stand a chance.

Halite has been in development since 2006, and over the years it has become a fast, full fledged lightweight BitTorrent client. One of the greatest strengths of Halite is that it uses minimal system resources. If you thought uTorrent was already lightweight, then correct yourself because Halite consistently uses up half the resources that uTorrent uses on my PC.

Halite supports all the basic features the average downloader would need including encryption, selective downloading, a torrent creator and more. At the moment there is no support for disk caching, seeding preferences and torrent queuing, but these and others are on the to do list, which means they will be implemented in the future.

In my tests I found Halite to be slightly faster than uTorrent in download speeds, but they don’t much of a difference.. On the other hand a few users have seen improvements in speed over uTorrent and other clients.

The real benefit obviously is the minimal system resources that Halite uses. Here are a few screenshots of Halite in action…

Overall if you are looking for a fast, lightweight BitTorrent client then I suggest you give Halite a try. I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Halite Homepage

RSS Feeds seem to be everywhere these days. With growing popularity and the sheer number of websites offering RSS Feeds, the search for good RSS Feed readers gains significance.

Before you tell more about Headline, I’d like to ask you which feed reader you use and what are the things that you like/dislike about it the most? I for one use Google reader as my primary feed reader and I am happy with it.

Ever since RSS has started to make attention into the mainstream the need for more functional RSS feed readers with a much more intuitive UI has arised and Headline aims to exactly fill that void.

Simply put Headline is a revolution in feed reading. It combines a sleek, clean interface with a powerful user experience.

Yes Headlines is one of the most stunning looking RSS feed readers I’ve ever seen. Its not only about its stunning looks but it also offers a range of features that you find in almost feed readers plus some more that you won’t find elsewhere.

Let me just rundown through the important features of Headline.

• Easy Filtering

Headline allows you to easily filter out contents switching from Today, This Week, This Month, All, Unread or Favorites items.

• Sharing

Headline can easily share articles to friends over iChat and Mail. No need to manually find, copy and send links to friends, Headline do it for you.

• Media Player

Headline has built in support for Audio and Video player. You can easily listen audio or watch video podcasts on the fly with out downloading any files.

• Core Animation

Headline starts with a revolutionary interface and then gets better. Core Animation provides smooth effects between views and articles.

• Beautiful Preview

Headline can easily preview any article, mimics Quick Look, without opening the default browser or an external application for that.

• Growl Notification

Headline can automatically notify you when there are new articles available via Growl Notifications. It allows you to see when there are new articles while using other applications.

Quite an impressive feature set I must say. I just wonder why doesn’t windows see such beautiful functional softwares. Here are some screenshots of Headline for you to drool over.

On the Mac I know many users swear by NetNewsWire, but to all those hardcore fans of NetNewsWire I suggest you give Headline a try.

Headline comes in at 19.95$ for a single user licence and is also available for 34.95$ for a Family Pack Licence.

Surely the AppStore has a bunch of apps that you can’t live without.. But there are also apps that are nothing short of stinkers. Among the hundreds of apps at the Appstore these are the apps you don’t want to have on your iPhone, except for a good laugh maybe..

Sure enough Apple accepted them into the store for being well coded but again who needs them. Come on Apple get some interesting apps on the board rather than these bad apples which spoil the party…

So here are the 10 iPhone Apps you don’t want to have…

• Alarm Free

I’m completely at loss to explain the need for this app. The developer describes it as “self-defense/emergency alarm with freefall detector”. Confused? Yeah me too… Its even got a cool looking graphic telling you what you are supposed to do.. Yeah right! Imagine this neat conversation that I’m having…

“Hey there Mr. Mugger, one sec let me whip out my iPhone real fast(you knew I had an iPhone right?) and…. ok, unlocked the screen, launched this app, and BEEP BEEP BEEP! HAHA take that! A beeping sound far more quiet than the sound of my own voice! What? You want the iPhone now in addition to my wallet? Weird“

• Cow Toss

Another gem of an app at the App Store.. All you gotta do is move the cow and watch it fly around with space… I guess the guy who wrote this genius was probably practicing how to write real apps for the App Store…

• Crazy Mouth

Don’t take this as just another app. The developer asks you this question “Why waste money on an expensive facelift when you can get your Crazy Mouth on! ” Basically its got a series of 10 animated mouths which you are supposed to select and put the iPhone up to your mouth and give the onlookers a good laugh..

Have a look at this demo.. Surely this is not the reason you brought your iPhone right?

• Flashlight

Caught up in dark alley is it? Oh come on you can always use your iPhone as a flashlight can’t you? Pay 0.99$ for this cool little app and light up the dark streets.. Oh well there are other apps like Light that do the same thing for free. But paid apps are always better right?

• SimStapler

Perhaps you would like to staple the Declaration of Independence to the Magna Carta? Or, your phone bill to the Book of Kells? With SimStapler and your imagination its “no problem”

Meh! Basically a tool you can use to teach your kids how to staple two sheets of paper..

• Looky

All this really useful that costs 3$ does is bring you live search results from Google. I thought Google does it already.. Save those 3 bucks and fire up Safari and search Google..

Trust me it ain’t that hard..

• Banner Free

Getting bored? Display whatever text you like on a cool looking LED Matrix display. Thank god its atleast free..

• Hold On!

Seriously the whole point of this lovely little app seems to be holding that huge “Hold” button for as long as you can… Apparently it’s supposed to increase your productivity by increasing your concentration levels.

God gracious atleast this thing is free. You don’t want to pay a few bucks just to hold a button on your iPhone do you..

Tip: To get the highest possible score hold the button and walk along as though nothing happened..

• Handy Randy

Can’t think of a random number for your latest password? If you didn’t take math all that seriously when you were in school this app is made for you.. This super expensive application that costs you 10$( !! ) draws random numbers..

Also this cool little app gets my vote for the most horribly designed app in the App Store.. I wonder if the developer had ever seen an iPhone?

• Yes|No

Need to take a quick decision? Fire up this lovely little app and hold the question in your mind.. Once you are done with that it will tell you a Yes or a No.. Use this for questions like..

Should I call him?
Should I go to bed?
Should I push this huge red button?

My suggestion is once you have got the answer you needed delete this app to save precious space on your iPhone..

There you go, 10 iPhone apps that you don’t want to have. I keep wondering what the developers of these apps had in mind while developing these gems.. Maybe they were thinking “I guess if you’ve dropped that much money on a phone that looks cool, I guess you could spend a bit more and get some useless programs for it.”

Found some more useful useless apps for the iPhone? Please share with us in the comments..