Surge 2.0 Released

Surge 2.0 has been released!

This has been a LONG time coming – it’s been 15 months since the initial release of Surge and I’ve not done a single update. The problem is that as it’s a hobby project, I’ve (a) ignored it when life has been in the way, and (b) I use it as a place to experiment because it’s my own.

However, it’s now ready for release. There’s been a massive rewrite to move to MVVM (although it’s a little hacky at the moment – I decided to release and then work on having cleaner MVVM, especially with Windows 10 on the horizon). I also removed the entire network/update stack and rewrote it in F#. I’m going to blog about this in much more detail later, but for now it’s enough to say that it was absolutely, definitely worth it. The code is easier to read, faster and several bugs were fixed in the process.

It took 11 months to have 10,000 downloads of Surge, and in the 4 months since I’ve had another 12,000. I can’t imagine how that will grow when I add support for Deluge and µTorrent. The number of downloads really helps motivate me to keep working on Surge, so thank you to everyone that has downloaded it.

Find out more about Surge here, and download it for free from the Windows Store (note that update has to propagate through the various store mirrors worldwide and this can take a few hours).

The release notes for Surge 2.0 are:

New Features:

  • You can set torrent download locations.
  • Force Start button.
  • An additional filter so that you can view all torrents with errors.
  • Option to always show app bar.
  • Support for clients with no password or anonymous access.
  • Count displayed for each torrent category (“All”, “Active”, etc.)
  • Support for ordering the list by name or by queue position.
  • Show available disk space on server.
  • Show verify and magnet progress.
  • Keyboard shortcuts.

Bugs Fixed:

  • If Surge is opened by a magnet link or torrent file, it will now be added to the server once connected.
  • Files pane now always displays folder structures correctly.
  • URL handling fixed for adding torrents and setting up the server details.
  • Add torrent button and other buttons don’t stay stuck in a disabled state.
  • Various crashes prevented.
  • Misc. small bugs.

Other:

  • Performance improvements, particularly regarding the files pane (opening it is up to 45 times faster!).
  • Base code support for coming updates including live tiles, notifications and support for µTorrent and Deluge.
  • Misc. UI improvements.