poisoned

For the past half-year or so, I’ve been using Acquisition, a Macintosh client for the gnutella network. It’s got some really nice features, integrates well with iTunes, and feels like a proper Mac OS X application.

But Acquisition has its problems: For one thing it’s crippleware, and the accursed warning panel that pops up now and then is bothersome. Acquisition also makes use of the Limewire engine for connecting to the gnutella network; While this makes life easier for Acquisition’s developer, it’s obnoxious for those of us who want decent performance on our machines; Limewire is notoriously resource-hungry, and will happily consume all the RAM and CPU you can throw its way.

So imagine my happiness when I stumbled across Poisoned, an open-source p2p client that addresses all of the problems I’ve had with Acquisition, and is nearly as full-featured. It connects to the gnutella, FastTrack, and OpenFT networks, and it seems like support for the OpenNap network is coming as well. Instead of the hungry Limewire core, it uses the open source “giftd”, which connects to the aforementioned networks through a plugin system. It is missing some of Acquisition’s neatest new features like the nice organization of search results, but is roughly equivalent with where Acquisition was 6 months ago in terms of nifty GUI features. Definitely one to keep an eye on.