I have been working for the past days in the foundation for a new Download Manager that I’m writing for the Mac platform, and this is just an “status quo” about how things are evolving.
What is done so far.
- A certainly modern multi-threaded Cocoa Framework implementation around libCurl‘s C API, which allows me to get my hands on the whole power of Curl, but without leaving the beauty of Objective-C and the Cocoa API’s at any moment.
- A pretty basic prorotype kind of UI which allows simple segmented download of files for the time being.
Download Thingy, the prototype UI
- A custom (and open, XML, standards based) file format baptized (you guessed) “.thingy” which takes care of storing partial download segments, some basic (for now) binary and redundancy checking, and of course, the ability to reconstruct itself into the original file.
A standard .thingy container.
- Main Launch Services integartion is partially done too.
- Some basic implementation of automatic mirror discovering.
What needs to be done.
- I have to write the foundation for a proper queue management system.
- Network Usage / Bandwidth Limiting logics are in the “to do” list too.
- A proper User Interface.
- A public alpha version with basic usability that people can start to use and report so i can accelerate the development based on actual user’s requests.
- A Safari / WebKit plugin.
So far, this is looking pretty nice and i think it will become a pretty interesting utility for the Mac community.
Im working in a new piece of software called “Download Thingy” (at least for now).