All new Macs come with great bundled software. Between the iLife suite, Safari, iTunes, and TextEdit, plus the ability to access and use cloud applications for free, almost all of the most basic modern computing needs get met for most users.

That said, having used four different Macs over the past seven years, there are several applications that don't come with OS X that I find myself immediately loading onto a new Mac. Most of these are big-name apps that you've probably already heard of, but it's still pretty amazing how much extra functionality you can eke out of a Mac with only ten additional programs, and all of them (save the last one) are free.

Whether you're buying a new Mac for a relative this holiday season or getting a new one for yourself, these are ten applications you should download as soon as that shiny new machine loads the desktop for the first time.

Way back in June of 2007, rumors of a beta version of uTorrent for the Mac first started making waves. For the uninitiated, uTorrent is a super-lightweight BitTorrent client which is widely considered the best in the business. Sadly, it has remained a Windows-only option. A few months ago, an alpha version was leaked (appropriately, on a BitTorrent tracker), but it was alpha, buggy and had a minimal UI (even by uTorrent standards).

Today, uTorrent has officially released its first Mac beta for Intel Macs running OS X 10.5 Leopard. It doesn't have all the features of its Windows counterpart (it's missing the RSS downloader, for instance) but it has a nice interface and the signature uTorrent low-memory footprint.

The only real question will be, is this too little too late? When uTorrent for the Mac was first announced 18 months ago, the BitTorrent client landscape was very different. Transmission was still new and buggy and Vuze (nee Azureus) suffered from significant problems with Tiger and Java. Today, Transmission is a full featured client and Vuze, although still a memory hog, is signicantly faster and more stable in Leopard.

This doesn't mean that it isn't great to finally have uTorrent for OS X -- it just means that the client will need to do more than just exist to get many users to switch over.

uTorrent for Mac is free. It is beta software and it will have bugs, but it is available now.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

If you're a fan of the ever so popular BitTorrent client, Transmission, then you might like to hear that a new version was just released. According to the release notes some of the fixes included:

• You can now reset global statistics
• Support of multitracker torrents has been improved
• UPnP port mapping now faster on startup
• Ability to IP block using the Bluetack Level1 blocklist
• Dock badge images have been updated

The new dock badges provide greater readability of the transfer in progress. Transmission is freeware and can be downloaded from their website.

Your iPhone plays audio. Your iPhone plays video. Until now, you had to sync those suckers. Today, the insanely brilliant iPhone Hacker core announced a preliminary version of a Transmission Peer-to-Peer client for iPhone. The code is ported from the Transmission site to run on the iPhone's ARM microprocessor. Tests on downloaded files produced the identical MD5 checksum as downloading via wget.

Now before you start torrenting, there are some important matters you need to know. First: P2P + EDGE do not mix. Let me repeat that for emphasis. They DO. NOT. MIX. That's because EDGE + P2P takes down EDGE faster than toppling a Jenga pile. Update Further testing has gotten 5kb/s over EDGE without crashing but it's an iffy proposition. Use with care.

Second, we are posting this because there are many *legal* torrents, including music and video, available for download. So please don't start getting into a "Torrent Good"/"Torrent Bad" flamewar in the comments.

Third, this is EXTREMELY preliminary software. It will develop over time -- so you probably don't want to grab a copy and start torrenting right away until it becomes more stable.

Fourth, this is a command-line client. As it matures, someone is going to slap a GUI on that baby but at this time, do not look for the software to show up in Installer.app or Cydia.

Finally, be aware that torrenting will wear down your battery faster than, um... toppling a Jenga pile. (C'mon folks. We're really short on family-friendly metaphors here. Suggest your own in the comments.)

Way to go core!

Just yesterday, we told you about the new GUI version of Transmission. For those who prefer remote control, there's also a web UI for the Transmission daemon, called (cleverly enough) Clutch, just updated to version 0.2. Clutch is an easy way to manage your BitTorrent downloads from anywhere you can access the internet.

Clutch is a front-end for the Transmission torrent engine; it doesn't require the GUI version of Transmission, and the two tools don't show each others' download results. but if you use both you may see download results from one tool in the other's list, say our commenters. Clutch uses the web server that's built into Mac OS X, along with AJAX and PHP for the web interface. The app is a self-contained package that has all of the software needed to run the web interface; just open, set a few preferences, and then -- boom -- you're done!

If you do not have a static IP address, or use a dynamic DNS service (such as DynDNS), then Clutch will give you a link to your current external IP address, so you can find and connect to your computer over the internet. You might ask "Why would I want to do that?" The answer is time management: BitTorrent downloads can take a while, much too long for you to wait around, and with this tool you can manage your downloads from work, school, or at the local Starbucks. Using this software means that you will have to open a port in your firewall (the default port is 9091, however, you may set it to use any inactive port above 1024 that you wish). Clutch 0.2 is open source and is available as a free download from the Clutch website.

Transmission, long available in beta form, is one of my favorite torrent clients. BitTorrent, as you probably know, is a way to transfer or share files over the internet, for free, using a 'swarm' model to speed files along. Transmission makes the downloading of those files quite stunning, with its simplicity and ease of use. Transmission's beautiful user interface goes nicely with Leopard, as it has been redesigned; not to mention, it's 100% Leopard compatible. Some of the new updates in version 1.0 include:

• Group labeling, filtering, and sorting
• Leopard: Time Machine will ignore incomplete downloads
• Display remaining time for seeding transfers
• Ability to set global and per-torrent number of connections

Overall, this looks like a very nice release. It is available right now, for free, from the Transmission website.

Transmission - the open source, lightweight BitTorrent client that is the closest alternative to uTorrent that us Mac users can get - has just released version .90.

New features added in this update include:

• Encryption support (finally!), with an option to ignore unencrypted peers
• The ability to ban peers that send too much bad data
• Reporting only downloaded and verified good data to the tracker
• Improved BitTorrent compliance and more

For OS X users, specific updates include:
A per-torrent action menu, optimizations to decrease memory usage, and general changes/updates to the interface to make managing files easier and to provide users with more options.

Note: Users upgrading from version .72 or earlier will lose any data from uncompleted downloads, so please beware and either move your torrents to another program or finish downloads before installing the upgrade.

[via Digg]

You TUAW readers have spoken loud and clear: Transmission is your favorite BitTorrent client. If you're nodding your head right now, you'll be happy to know that v0.8 of the cross-platform app has gone official, ushering in a boatload of new features and fixes for all OSes it works on, as well as some great Mac-only goodies. Before we get to the new stuff, however, I have to echo a warning on the main Transmission page: if you're in the middle of any downloads right now, finish them before upgrading; you could lose data if you jump the gun.

That said, let's talk about the shiny new changes. First up, here are the new feature highlights that everyone can enjoy:

• Ability to selectively download and prioritize files
  
• Torrent file creation
  
• Speed and CPU load improvements
  
• Better rechecking of torrents that have many files

And here are the new goodies just for Mac OS X users:

• Overlay when dragging torrent files, URLs, and data files onto window
  
• Ability to set an amount of time to consider a transfer stalled
  
• More progress bar colors
  
• Various smaller interface improvements
  
• Italian, Korean, and Russian translations

More details and screenshots are available at the Transmission site, and be sure to swing by the Transmission donation page to show the development crew some love.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

One of the things I love about OS X is the fact that for pretty much any conceivable task, there are multiple applications to choose from with which to do it. Unfortunately, this hasn't really been the case when it comes to BitTorrent clients. Yes, there may have been multiple native clients out there, but only two of them were really any good– BitRocket and Transmission– and for the longest time, Transmission was banned on many private torrent trackers. This left only BitRocket, a client lacking some key features such as the ability to view and set upload/download ratios. Until Today.

Transmission 0.71 fixes the much hated multiple-announce bug which caused it's banning by many trackers. The new version also includes some other small bug fixes and interface updates. Transmission is Open Source and available as a free download.

Goodbye BitRocket!

[via CrunchGear]

Almost a year after the last version, (and sporting a spiffy new icon) the open-source bittorrent client Transmission has been updated to version 0.7. In addition to numerous bug-fixes, highlights of this version include automatic port mapping, individual torrent bandwidth limits, user-ordering of the queue, and more. In many ways, Transmission tries to be the uTorrent for OS X (and Linux), i.e. very light-weight, but still full featured.

Transmission 0.7 is available now for free download.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

The market for Mac torrent clients has been expanding quite a bit recently, and Torrentfreak has a nice review of a new beta version of Transmission, a long-standing favorite of many a Mac torrenter. While the review rounds up many of the nice new features, I'll give you the cliff notes for the slackers in the crowd: "Transmission 0.7 Beta is by far the fastest, most light-weight and one of the most appealing BitTorrent clients for the Mac."

Diving further in, some of Transmission's new features seem to be inspired by Xtorrent, a new beta client from Dave Watanabe (of NewsFire fame). Of these new features, notables include time-of-day based speed limits (i.e. - slow down my torrent downloads while I'm at my desk at work from 9-5), as well as a Watch Folder with automatic cleanup of your torrent files (again, very Xtorrent inspired). The idea is: most Mac browsers by default download all files to the desktop, but that might not be where torrent users want to keep their downloads as well. This Watch Folder allows Transmission to automatically snag any torrent files you download to the desktop, move them to a user-specified folder and begin the torrent download. Ah, software automation - it's a beautiful thing.

Check out the rest of Torrentfreak's review, as plenty more is packed under the hood of this new beta.

[via digg]

News is coming in via digg commenters and posts on forum threads linked therein which seems to indicate and give evidence that BitRocket uses code taken from the Transmission.app source without giving any attribution as required by the MIT license under which Transmission is released. These accusations are further supported by the fact that the developer of BitRocket, Julian Ashton, previously developed XFactor, a P2P application, which was proven to take code from the Poisoned project, again without proper attribution.

Update: Scott, our fearless leader, did some digging and found a post on the forum thread linked that I seem to have missed. According to at least one account, BitRocket does properly credit the source it uses.