WebTorrent Desktop – Open source streaming torrent client
This is what Feross and I have been working on the past few weeks. It's been a lot of fun. Here are a few of the things I learned:<p>* Electron is <i>surprisingly</i> nice to work with. It is simple, pragmatic, and thorough. System tray integrations, desktop notifications, launcher progress bar in OSX, installers for all three platforms, seamless auto updaters for Mac and Windows, a crash reporter, and so on --- all built in. Many of the little things that an app needs to feel native and professional have clean cross-platform APIs.<p>* Shout out to Cheng Zhao, aka zcbenz. He's incredibly prolific and seems to be nearly single-handedly developing the Electron project. Every single page of Electron docs or code I've looked at on Github, the latest commit on it is zcbenz.<p>* Peer-to-peer is moving very fast. WebRTC support in browsers was flaky and buggy until very recently. Even today, Chrome has a few big bugs left ( eg <a href="https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=392651" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=392651</a> ) and WebRTC is not yet supported in Web Workers ( <a href="https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=302019" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=302019</a> ). But things are improving quickly. Edge is getting Data Channel support soon. Safari is almost certainly gonna get WebRTC support as well -- it's already in WebKit, just not enabled in Safari yet.<p>Tons of cool new uses of the web are just at the edge of becoming possible.<p>I'm really excited about the way WebTorrent Desktop bridges the WebTorrent and BitTorrent networks. If enough people end up running it, BitTorrent in the browser will really happen. Projects like the Internet Archive can make huge files available for immediate streaming on their website, without paying for bandwidth. It's going to be interesting times.