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.

It is basically a Download Manager for Mac OS X. The main reasons why I am doing this are simple: There seems to be not a single Download Manager for the Mac that complies with the following:

• It is Free.
• It doesn’t have a lot of features that i will NEVER use.
• Comes with a simple UI putting the main focus on the Downloads and not on other stuff I don’t care.
• Allows segmented / multi threaded downloads.
• Allows limiting the download speed in a “per download” or “overall” basis.

For this project I’m using the amazing libCurl library as the download engine backend.

Anybody who is interested to participate in a private alpha testing of this (yet prototype) app feel free to comment on this post and i will get back to you when an alpha version is ready for testing.

Cheers, Diego.