New Firefox add-on

[moondoggie]

well, vertical text could work, but dont u think that would also take a lot of room?

i'll attach the two screenshots of how it looks like.

i agree that simple splitting the lines would gain the small benefit, and as u said would still stretch it. perhaps it could go to 4 lines?

U:

xxxx

D:

xxxx

i have thought about your comment when not connected. perhaps it could be made with an auto switch option when using vertical design? i.e. when not connected it would automatically return to icon mode, and it would go gray. on reconnect it would go to "last state used".

[lithopsian]

Vertical text on a vertical toolbar shouldn't take any more room than horizontal text on a horizontal toolbar? Of course vertical toolbars tend to be shorter. Playing about, I feel the vertical text is not easy to read, and kind of the whole point of the addon is to have the information available at a glance.

If there is a number of characters that is an acceptable limit then I can work with that on multiple lines (I think, not tested yet). Four characters might not be enough though, certainly five and maybe 6, or maybe it needs six lines. I can come up with something for the disconnected state, the "uTorrent" text was just a quick simple thing that worked on the horizontal status bar.

I think I might code multiple toolbar items rather than try to detect the type of toolbar or provide a preference. Then either could be used, or both. Possibly the compact mode should be a third toolbar item also, rather than a preference. I'm guessing there is no such thing as a status bar shim on a vertical toolbar?

[moondoggie]

hm, to tell you the truth, i would like to see how it looks with vertical text if its as you mention it.

there is no fixed number of characters that i aim on mate, tbh i setup a vertical toolbar because of the wide screen as there was room for it, and it leaves more room horisontaly for the page rendering. so i think i could live with some "wideness" on it.

status bar shim ???? you will have to enlighten me on this one mate. whats a status bar shim?

if your asking about a regular status bar, you can notice on my screen shots that i even moved the status bar on the toolbar. i grouped them in a way. so there is some room on it too...

br

alex

[lithopsian]

You should be able to get some vertical text just by putting a few lines in userChrome.css. Not very pretty! Better might be normal horizontal characters one on top of the other, but I'm not sure there is a simple CSS way to try that. Maybe with "word-wrap:break-word;" and maybe specify a width too.

#uTorrent-toolbar-panel {
    -moz-transform: rotate(90deg) !important;
}

The status bar shim is what used to be the status bar, before 4.0 and now shows up at one end of the addon toolbar. It will go away soon, I'm surprised it has lasted this long. I will drop support for it sooner or later, but that means dropping support for 3.6 users and there are still quite a lot of them.

[lithopsian]

I've uploaded a new beta with a vertical toolbar widget. Just a quick and dirty copy for the moment, but the status bar is still supported.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torrent-status-tool/versions/

[lithopsian]

The latest release includes a new toolbar element designed for vertical toolbars. This is has narrower text on multiple lines. I don't use vertical toolbars myself so this may not be ideal for everyone, but it should be better than the current wide panel.

[moondoggie]

just installed the new update. my life was on a hiatus the past 30ish days so i wasnt even online...

testing it for 3h and so far it looks really nice. works as it should work

ty for such a great addon and update

just noticed a weird bug o0

when its in compact mode, and i middleclick open the webui, it opens TWO new tabs

[gargamon]

I really like this addon. I use it on a small screen netbook running debian.

I like very much the tooltip you get when compact mode is off. However, I can't afford the extra space that compact mode being off takes in the status bar. Would you think it is worthwhile to create an option to show the full tooltip when just showing the icon in the status bar? You would probably also need to put the D:xxx and U:XXX stuff into the tooltip in this case.

Like many others adding torrents fail from many servers. I turned off the add in this addon and added the webui+ one to do the adds and everything works great. You might consider removing the add stuff here due to it's inconsistent behavior. I agree with your assessment that you shouldn't duplicate functionality already available.

Thanks.

[lithopsian]

just noticed a weird bug o0

when its in compact mode, and i middleclick open the webui, it opens TWO new tabs

I can't reproduce this. Do you have some other tab handling extension that is perhaps taking the click and deciding it needs to be opened in a new tab?

[lithopsian]

I really like this addon. I use it on a small screen netbook running debian.

I like very much the tooltip you get when compact mode is off. However, I can't afford the extra space that compact mode being off takes in the status bar. Would you think it is worthwhile to create an option to show the full tooltip when just showing the icon in the status bar? You would probably also need to put the D:xxx and U:XXX stuff into the tooltip in this case.

Like many others adding torrents fail from many servers. I turned off the add in this addon and added the webui+ one to do the adds and everything works great. You might consider removing the add stuff here due to it's inconsistent behavior. I agree with your assessment that you shouldn't duplicate functionality already available.

Thanks.

In compact mode, the full tooltip is available by hovering on the open webui menu item (and from the tools menu). I'll see if there is some way to make it available without opening the menu.

I half-regret ever adding the torrent file handling, even though I suspect it is quite useful to many people. Originally it was just magnet links which work like a charm, and even those can be handled just using a trivial shell script. Rather than take it out completely, I think I'll turn it off by default and make it clear in the options dialog that it will only work for non-authenticated torrent servers.

[lithopsian]

I caved Or as I like to think of it, I couldn't resist a technical challenge

I looked at the other implementations of torrent file downloading and felt I could do better. So I've done better. Ver 0.2 is up and should submit any torrent file that you can download directly to your configured uTorrent.

Actually the content handler, stream listeners and XMLHttpRequest were much simpler than I expected. The most complex bit was handling things like timeouts and concurrent requests, especially since a file download and upload can take several seconds. See if you can break it by clicking really fast on different files

Still no real feedback from uTorrent other than "yes, I got your request", but that now means "yes, I got your file" so it almost always succeeds from that point. The only things that are likely to result in no torrent being added are a corrupt file or a duplicate file.

Oh, here's the link if you don't want to scroll to the top of the thread:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torrent-status-tool/

[mirlipili]

Maybe i missed a step during the installation, but I can't get the torrents to open directly in utorrent. Is there something i need to do?

Thanks

[lithopsian]

Make sure you have the server and login correctly configured. If the status button (in status bar or drag it from the configuration palette to a toolbar) lights up and shows you your torrents then you are correctly configured. If not, open up the options and set the server address, port, admin user, etc.

On the options dialog, check the last tab to see if you torrent files and magnet links are configured to be handled by this addon.

Once you've done all that, clicking on a torrent file link or magnet link should send it to uTorrent. If not then I'd like as much detail as you can provide on what happens.

[lithopsian]

A few people asked to be able to see the full torrent list from the compact icon. The latest version does this. If you hold down the control key then the small tooltip will switch to the full tooltip. I'm looking at adding a configuration option to turn this off in case it gets annoying for some people.

[moondoggie]

bug reporting

still using this addon as a favorite one:)

new firefox crashes it somehow, it stays greyed out on the toolbar, but i can go around it if i manually open a tab and go to webui and login. After that, everything works cool for the current session of firefox

~cheers

md

[lithopsian]

Is this with Firefox 18? I've had other people report this but I don't see it. What settings do you have? Do you have a password set? Can you look in the Firefox error console and see if there are messages?

[moondoggie]

its in firefox 18.0.1. 18.0.0 didnt do this for me.

i have a pass set in utorr webui,and no other special settings save for user,pass,ip...

the only error in console is this:

Timestamp: 26.1.2013 20:33:32

Error: ReferenceError: utorrent is not defined

Source File: javascript:%20utorrent

Line: 1

[lithopsian]

That error just indicates that there was an earlier error. You might need to look when Firefox starts up, or it might not be visible with your settings. I'll make sure I have the exact version and see if I can spot something.

Have you tried any other versions like the 19 beta?

[lithopsian]

Here's a thought. Are you connected to the internet through a proxy? Connected to uTorrent through a proxy?

[moondoggie]

nothing else here mate. i restarted FF and got nothing else.

will install beta and try out

edit:

the latest add-on from the development channel from ff page works correctly. no errors in logs again

[moondoggie]

nope. proxy-less. i'm an adsl user, no proxy, fixed local ip on router, dynamic ip with my isp.

but like i said, the latest developer version fixes it.

(i changed my router yesterday, so it's not some local settings too)

[lithopsian]

I still can't get to the bottom of this. I've found a few other people with issues, but they mostly seem to be down to cookies being blocked, and I don't think that's what you have.

Just for reference, for anyone looking in here for help: make sure cookies are not blocked or this addon will not work. Add an exception to allow cookies to your webui http address if you generally run with cookies blocked.

[lithopsian]

Starting in Firefox 18, some people are experiencing intermittent difficulties connecting or staying connected. A symptom is repeated dialogs asking for a username and password.. One fix for this is to make sure that the "Store non-blank password in password manager" checkbox is set in the addon options dialog on the server configuration tab.

Obviously you only need to do this if you have a password. Leaving the box unchecked will cause the addon to authenticate in the background with a blank password which will cause a disconnect even if you'd already managed to connect manually.

I don't know why it suddenly started to be a problem in Firefox 18. Maybe a timing issue. I can't find any relevant changes in Firefox.

[lithopsian]

So, Firefox 18 completely broke http authentication dialogs. They no longer (give you the option to) have Firefox remember your password and they don't even appear half the time. Pending fixes from Firefox, here are some workarounds to get you moving:

1. If your webUI admin password is blank, then just make sure you have the checkbox filled out correctly in the options to use a blank password, fill in the admin username, and you should be good to go. Prior to FF18 you could have to checkbox wrong, connect manually to the webUI, and the addon would stay connected, but this is now broken (actually this is intentional and Firefox was wrong before to remember the authentication).

2. If you have a password set in uTorrent then you have a harder time. There are two possible solutions:

2a, if you want to store your password in Firefox: to store the password, you must manually login to the webUI (http://localhost:8080/gui or whatever) and save the password when prompted. Then just make sure the username is filled in correctly in the addon options dialog, make sure the checkbox is correct (critical, you must change the default!). You will automatically connect each time you start Firefox, although you may still get a prompt if you start the webUI before the addon gets chance to connect. Prior to FF18, having the wrong checkbox value would let you connect manually, but this is no longer the case.

2b, if you don't want Firefox to remember your password: you will have to fill out your username and password every time you start Firefox and the addon will keep prompting you until you do it correctly. First step is to change the timeout on the polling tab of the addon options dialog, because the auth prompt is now asynchronous and will time out. 10 seconds should be enough time for most people to type their username and password. Then you *must* set the checkbox correctly so that the addon doesn't just send a blank password, and you *must* set the username to blank or you won't be prompted.

I will make this work better, but I'm waiting now to see whether Mozilla are going to fix what they broke in Firefox 18.

[Anach]

So, Firefox 18 completely broke http authentication dialogs.

That work-around worked ok in FF 18, bu in FF 19, the tool wont authenticate at all. Even with the password saved, and logged into WebUI manually, the tool remains greyed out.

While I wait for a fix, I'm currently using the alternative "Bittorrent WebUI" plugin 2.2.3, which appears to be working fine.