The new KGet is being developed in a SVN branch (branches/work/make_kget_cool/) at the moment, but it will (hopefully) be moved back to the kdenetwork module soon. It already has some really hot highly-requested features in it, for example multi-threaded downloads. But that's not all! Have a look at the screenshots. You will see that it has a completely new user interface, including grouping functionality for the download entries. But please keep in mind that the user interface will probably change even more in the future. The configuration dialog is completely new. You probably know the so-called 'drop target' (the green KGet icon in one of the screenshots) from the "old" KGet; you can drop URL's onto the drop target in order to download with KGet. The new drop target has nice animations (which of course can be disabled in the configuration dialog, like almost every feature). Thanks to the plugin based architecture, everyone can easily develop plugins in order to support new protocols. More about this feature later.
The features listed above are already implemented. But there are also a lot of features still in progress:
- Metalink support: the new, open standard for downloading larger files from different mirrors, or even different protocols (e.g. HTTP, FTP and BitTorrent) at the same time.
- Mirror search for downloads
- BitTorrent support (we are going to co-operate with the KTorrent team, but we need to wait until libktorrent is ported fully to Qt 4/KDE 4). There is already a torrent plugin, based on libtorrent, but it is not ported yet.
- Full interaction support with the new kio_uiserver.
- Bandwidth limiting functionality.
If you have any comments, please let us know!