Introducing Steadyflow: An Easier Download Manager

steadyflow, ubuntu

For the last two weeks, in my spare time, I’ve been working on a small personal project. I noticed that my desktop lacked a good standalone download manager.

But what about gwget? Well, I found gwget’s UI quite rough and lacking polish, and upon looking at its code, I decided that it would be easier to just write a new one from scratch—and that it would be a standalone application integrating with modern desktop technologies, not a wget wrapper. And now that I actually have a working download manager, it’s time to present Steadyflow.

Yes, the UI is inspired by Transmission. This was my idea: to have, basically, a Transmission for HTTP/FTP. The application is written in Vala, which serves two purposes: one, it ensures a relatively small memory footprint not dependent on the Python or Mono runtime, and two, it lets me write object-oriented code that Just Works, in a modern, strongly-typed language. I hope interested contributors will find the code clean and easy to understand.

What currently works:
* Basic download manager functionality: starting and finishing downloads.
* Panel indicator and minimizing to it.
* Notification popups.
* Preferences.
* Translations.

What is there yet to implement:
* Advanced control over downloads: pausing, resuming, saving and restoring the session.
* Controlling from the command line.
* Epiphany extension.
* D-Bus API (maybe not for the 0.1 release).

Translations are open on Launchpad, and I would appreciate code contributions as well—the code is in Bazaar on Launchpad. It should build and run on Lucid and Maverick, although on Lucid, you’ll need to install the Vala compiler version 0.9.8 from the Vala team PPA to build it.

I’m planning to release version 0.1 the coming week; in the meantime, I welcome your contributions, bug reports, and comments over here!

Comments

launchpad.net/~ralf-nieuwenhuijsen posted at 06:55, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Why not add the support for http/ftp transfers to transmission?

Having two separate tools, just because the protocols are different seems a little insane to me.

launchpad.net/~ajeans posted at 10:59, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

This looks nice (and in Vala no less).

People have been complaining for a long time because of the lack of rate control for downloads / copies.

Once that is said, this will only make sense if this can become a general mechanism to control :
– file copies
– http downloads (firefox / chromium)
– ftp downloads

I am not sure that integrating it with transmission would make sense (as the previous commenter said). P2P software is really specific because of the leech/seed ratio.

Thanks.

lucidfox.org posted at 11:25, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

You can in fact already use Steadyflow to copy local files. Since it relies on GIO to open remote files, it’s protocol-agnostic and you can copy by specifying the source URL as something like file:///home/user/folder/file.ext. It won’t copy folders, though, only single files.

As for Transmission… Its developers are free to add single file downloads if they want, but it’s really geared towards torrents as whole sets of files to download, and towards peer-to-peer downloads. Instead I would prefer Transmission to remain a torrent client instead of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

launchpad.net/~stefan-ubuntu posted at 14:55, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

When I installed Ubuntu for the first time two years ago I have noticed that there is no valid replacement for GetRight on Windows, or Speed Download on Mac.

http://getright.com/screens.html
http://www.macupdate.com/images/screens/uploaded/4710_scr.png

Currently there are several download managers for Linux, and few of them are in development. I can just hope that one of them will become valid replacement for GR.

launchpad.net/~quikee posted at 18:28, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

Hi,

For simple rate control with GIO streams you can look at my ThrottledInputStream and ThrottledOutputStream in this code http://gitorious.org/ptop/ptop/blobs/master/Tools.vala
Maybe this code will help a little. I would contribute and try to implement rate control myself but I currently don’t have free time to do it.

launchpad.net/~estelar57 posted at 18:34, 13 September 2010 (UTC)

my current favorites are:

aria (first version)
fatrat

both let you limit the speed easily and are stable/reliable (no adding of incomplete features).

but i would love to have steadyflow on that list :)

anyway getting the flashgot guys to integrate it with firefox is a must!

keep up the good work, am sure it will be one of the best for us ubuntu users. Easy to use and “just works”

also i think someone mentioned a monochrome icon :D

launchpad.net/~ssh-rdp posted at 06:55, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

Download managers are necessary in closed-source world where Internet Explorer/Your favorite closed source browser downloader sucks and you can’t do anything about it. Why can’t we fix firefox or epiphany if anything is wrong with them?

launchpad.net/~sirblackheart posted at 09:57, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

I’m happy to see another try to get a nice download manager for linux.
The Interface seems nice, and I hope to try it out soon.
On Windows I’m using free download manager http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/index.htm

It is is capable of downloading torrents to, even if I have never used that functionality.

Sure having a normal download manager integrated in transmission would be nice, but it seems, that they dont want to add this function.

So steadyflow realy looks like a nice alternative.

estelar57 is right, flashgot integration is a must…

Why not combine the resume and pause button?

www.google.com/profiles/ztokarczyk posted at 18:59, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

ArchLinux package created on AUR :)

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