Quick Guide: How to use uTorrent on a Mac
The recent (June ‘07) article over on TorrentFreak about uTorrent for Mac doesn’t seem hopeful or at least soon coming. They do have another article explaining ways to run uTorrent on your Mac via Crossover Office (beta) or Parallels.
As I migrated away from Windows I bought a copy of Parallels thinking I’d run them side by side so I could use some of those Windows-only apps like XnView and my old copy of Fontlab Using Windows apps so seldomly, I don’t like the idea of installing (and making me buy) a whole copy of Windows onto my Macbook Pro for an occasional use.
Enter uTorrent.
I had been using Azureus for my torrenting needs until Comcast started blocking resetting my upload transfers. I read that uTorrent was so much better but alas, Windows only. Well, after trying the ie4osx kit, I ended up not using the IE part so much as the intel native Darwine kit and it’s accompanying WinHelper.app. 
I gave it a try, downloaded the uTorrent installer, ran it through WineHelper.app and seconds later, a successful install. The real test was would it launch and better yet, access the internets? It does.
Required Parts for uTorrent on the Mac:
1] Install X11 from your Mac OSX install CD or DVD. This is necessary for running any Windows apps without using Parallels.
2] Download and install Darwine for your Mac’s CPU architecture
Mount the DMG and drag the “Darwine” folder to your “Applications” folder. Run the various wine* apps in the “Sample Applications” folder inside the “Darwine” folder. These will help better configure the environment.
Links to both Intel and PowerPC builds of Darwine:
Darwine for Intel Macs
Darwine for PPC Macs
3] Download the install package for uTorrent.
Run the install.exe and let uTorrent install to the “Program Files” directory (a hidden “.wine” folder within your home folder).
uTorrent
4] Launch WineHelper.app from the “Darwine” folder then go to File > Open, Program Files > utorrent > utorrent.exe
This will launch X11, a log window and a terminal window. You can safely close both the log and terminal windows without hurting the uTorrent process.
5] Open a torrent from uTorrent’s File menu, point it to where you want to save the file and you’re off!
Note: You can’t hide uTorrent like a normal Mac app, you can hide X11 but not the uTorrent window itself. However, you can minimize it like a normal Windows app, except it will minimize down to the bottom left of your screen, sort of hovering near the top edge of the dock. Clicking the reduced title bar will present you with a pop-up menu of options like “Restore”, “Close” “Maximize” and a few uTorrent specific options.
Note2: If the option “Minimize uTorrent to tray” it checked, uTorrent will disappear to a tiny rectangular window and icon at the top left of your screen, directly under the menu bar. This icon can be right-clicked to access all of uTorrent’s system tray icon options.
Hopefully, the uTorrent for Mac project will continue but this works (for me) in the meantime.
7. May 2008 um 10:58
I really appreciate the effort you put into writing thins, but I’ve run into quite a few snags. There seems to be quite a few other external things necessary that weren’t included. I’m on a PowerPC Mac which might account for some of the issues but probably not anywhere near all of them.
Darwine seems to need Freetype to run and Freetype needs Darwinports/Macports to be installed from some type of GUI. MacPorts doesn’t install a GUI of any kind, so you have to use it, via command line, to install freetype and then on top of all of that…atleast on my system I’m instructed to install some AFM files(?)
I definitely would like to hear what you may have to say about what other installs you’d already done prior to this one and what your solutions were.
7. June 2008 um 05:29
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Quick Guide: How to use uTorrent on a Mac, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.
7. July 2008 um 01:39
This might be coming a little late but I have X11 installed so that may be a requirement and fill the other external things Butch mentioned, such as FreeType.
Honestly, I haven’t used uTorrent on my Mac since writing this how-to. I was a victim of Comcast bittorrent throttling and, at the time, uTorrent was giving me slightly better performance than other BT clients. Right now, I use Transmission for all my bittorrenting needs, it works really well and does so without any issues. For those looking to uTorrent on the Mac, don’t waste any more time and just download Transmission [http://www.transmissionbt.com/download.php].