Poisoned is an incredibly useful file sharing utility for MacOS X. Actually, it is a client for the modular giFT open source file transfer daemon supporting the Gnutella, OpenFT, Ares, and FastTrack protocols. The name stems from the English translation of the German word "gift", meaning "poison."
Poisoned has several advantages over other existing P2P clients for MacOS X that make it such a wonderful tool:
- Seamless support for three protocols.
- Lots of search results, fast.
- You can filter search results containing a string, and also by network.
- A clean and fairly efficient user interface.
- The giFT daemon is bundled with Poison, so you only need to upgrade one program.
- It's reliable. Acquisition likes to find different ways of not working every time I upgrade, and my download queue disappears every once in a while.
- Decent support for FastTrack (thanks to giFT), though FastTrack has sinced changed its encryption and the giFT project is no longer actively supporting it. OpenFT is better, anyways.
Last, but most important, Poisoned is open source. I am all for supporting shareware or optional-donation-ware, but it really is not economical to pay for a program when there is another that does the same thing (and in this case, more) for free. The best way to support open source software is to use it, and the authors of Poisoned would rather see your money given to Amnesty International, Freenode, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation instead.
More info
Poisoned web site @ gottsilla.net: <http://gottsilla.net/software.php?site=poisoned>
giFT home page: <http://gift.sourceforge.net/>