Ever felt that your desktop has been bereft of a modern and capable download manager? Ubuntu member Maia Kozheva felt the same and decided to do something about it.
Meet Steadyflow.
The why
“I noticed that my desktop lacked a good standalone download manager.” Maia writes in her blog post announcing the project.
But what about gwget, you ask? The ‘rough’ UI, the fact it’s nothing more than a wrapper to the terminal command ‘wget’ &, most importantly, from ‘looking at its code’ she decided  it would be ‘easier to just write a new one from scratch’.
“[my idea was] to have, basically, a Transmission for HTTP/FTP.”
The application is written in Vala which affords the application a light memory and resource footprint.
The now
Working fast Maia’s application is already close to a 0.1 release.
What features can you expect to find? Those currently working are: –
- Basic download manager functionality: starting and finishing downloads.
- Panel indicator and minimizing to it.
- Notification popups.
- Preferences.
- Translations.
She also notes that there are several features yet to be implemented, including:
- Advanced control over downloads: pausing, resuming, saving and restoring the session.
- Controlling from the command line.
- Epiphany extension.
- D-Bus API
Get involved
Code and paste ahoy from Maia’s blog: –
“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.”
If you’re interested in lending a hand you’ll find the project launchpad page here and Maia’s blog here.