Changelog

All notable changes to Macget. Format follows Keep a Changelog; versions follow SemVer.

[Unreleased]

[1.3.0] — 2026-07-29

Book catalogs, BitTorrent, a reworked browser extension, and an engine that backs off on evidence instead of guesswork.

Added

• Book catalog browsing. A new browser (⇧⌘B) searches and browses book catalogs and sends a chosen format straight to the download queue. Project Gutenberg (~75k public-domain titles) and the Internet Archive work out of the box; any OPDS feed — including a personal Calibre server — can be added under Settings › Catalogs.

  • Downloads are named Title - Author.epub rather than the catalog's own 2701.epub.
  • DRM-wrapped, priced, and loan-only editions are shown but never fetched — the detail pane explains which of the three applies.
  • Generic OPDS support covers both wire formats: 1.2 (Atom XML) and 2.0 (JSON).
  • Standard Ebooks is included but off by default: all of its OPDS feeds return 401 to anonymous clients, since access is a Patrons Circle donor benefit. Patrons can switch it on.

• BitTorrent downloads. Magnet links and .torrent files download through the queue alongside everything else, several at once, sharing the same concurrency limit, pause/resume/cancel, and quiet-hours scheduling. Add them via ⌘N, drag-and-drop, or the magnet: handler.

  • Off by default. Enabling it shows a one-time explanation: BitTorrent uploads as well as downloads, opens a listening port, and makes your IP visible to the swarm.
  • Seeding is bounded — ratio 1.0 or 60 minutes by default, whichever comes first, both configurable in Settings › Torrents along with an upload cap, the listening port, and DHT.
  • Rows show download and upload rate, and a live share ratio while seeding.
  • Internet Archive items can be fetched as a single torrent covering every file in the item — much kinder to IA than pulling files over HTTP.
  • MacGet does not search for or index torrents.

• The browser extension talks back. A real toolbar popup replaces the settings-form-as-popup: it shows whether MacGet is actually reachable (the native host is pinged, not a checkbox read), a recent-activity list of what was sent, and quick toggles. Plus context-menu capture on links and media, a toolbar badge, and an optional notification per capture.

• Folder-grouped download list. Downloads collapse into per-category folders (Video, Audio, Documents, Archives, …) that expand in place, so a long queue stays navigable.

• Live speed chart and chunk view in the inspector. The inspector plots throughput over time and shows per-chunk progress, so a stalled connection is visible rather than inferred.

• Warm color theme. New app icon and a reworked palette with named color sets for surfaces, text, and status (including a seeding state for torrents), tuned for both light and dark mode.

Changed

• Connections no longer ramp up — they start at full width. The old adaptive probe opened at 4 connections and kept each new one only on a ≥15% throughput gain. But "no improvement" is the expected reading once the link is already saturated, so it reliably settled low precisely when the extra connections were free. A download now opens at its full effective thread count immediately, staggered 100 ms apart.
• Backing off is now evidence-driven. DemotionPolicy halves the worker count after 4 no-progress attempts in 10 s and only while bytes are still flowing — which separates a hostile host (refuses some connections, keeps serving the rest) from a dead local link (everything fails at once).
• Endgame chunk splitting. Once every outstanding piece is assigned, a freed worker splits the largest in-flight piece in half (floored at 1 MB) instead of idling, so the last slow chunk no longer sets the finish time.
• Learned per-host caps expire after 7 days and can be cleared from Settings › Network, which shows how many hosts currently have one. They still only ratchet downward within that window — a cap mislearned during an outage now heals itself instead of slowing that host forever.

Fixed

• Media downloads from authenticated pages no longer 403. Cookies captured by the browser extension were passed to yt-dlp as --add-header "Cookie: …", which yt-dlp applies to every request including the CDN media fetch — and YouTube rejects an authenticated googlevideo.com request that carries no proof-of-origin token. The probe would succeed and the download that followed would die. Cookies now go through a domain-scoped Netscape cookie jar.
• A backgrounded extension worker no longer drops legitimate downloads. When the MV3 service worker slept, its recent-gesture map came back empty, and a download started in a background tab matched the jump-link filter and was silently discarded. The filter now fails open.
• Selected rows stay readable in light mode. AppKit inverts semantic foreground colors on a selected row, but the card kept its opaque white fill — white text on white. Row text is now drawn with explicit colors that follow selection.
• content.js no longer installs a permanent 800 ms repositioning timer on every page visited, and the in-page capture button survives fullscreen and hostile page CSS.

Notes

• Torrents use aria2 as the engine. It is not bundled: unlike the static ffmpeg/yt-dlp builds, aria2 links against five system libraries, so MacGet installs it via Homebrew on first use instead (which also means MacGet never redistributes GPL software).
• Project Gutenberg is read through Gutendex rather than Gutenberg's own OPDS feed, whose search results are one sub-feed per book rather than direct download links.
• The Internet Archive is read through its JSON search/metadata APIs because IA retired its OPDS BookServer — bookserver.archive.org no longer resolves.

[1.2.0] — 2026-06-26

Media downloads, authenticated transfers, smarter organization, and live auto-updates.

Added

• Media (video/audio) downloads via yt-dlp. A conservative host-based MediaURLClassifier routes known video/audio sites to the bundled yt-dlp + ffmpeg extractor; ordinary links still download as plain HTTP files. A format picker lets you choose quality/container.
• Authenticated downloads. Keychain-backed CredentialStore answers Basic/Digest/NTLM challenges; an auth prompt sheet captures username/password and persists it per host so authenticated downloads keep working across launches.
• Auto-sort into category folders. Optional CategoryFolder sorting drops finished files into per-type subfolders (Video, Audio, Image, Archive, …), matching the icon shown in the list.
• Priority-aware scheduler. A stable DownloadScheduler runs higher-priority downloads first while preserving insertion order on ties.
• Sparkle auto-updates — now enabled. The Sparkle SPM dependency is linked, Hardened Runtime is on, and SUPublicEDKey is set, so release builds verify (EdDSA) and install updates from the appcast. Check for Updates… is live in the menu bar.

Fixed

• FileTypeIcon now classifies common video/audio extensions (e.g. .mkv, .webm) explicitly, so categorization is deterministic on a clean machine instead of depending on which media apps have registered the type.

1.1.0 — 2026-06-22

Engine throughput, reliability, correctness, and user-control improvements.

Added

• Adaptive concurrency (speed-aware up-scaling). Downloads start at 4 connections and probe upward one at a time, keeping each added connection only when aggregate throughput improves ≥ 15%. Demotion (anti-leech) and the learned per-host cap always win, so probing never fights them.
• Work-stealing chunking. ChunkPlanner slices range-capable downloads into smaller pieces than workers (8 MB target, ≤ 64 pieces); finished workers immediately steal the next outstanding piece, eliminating the "one slow chunk holds up the download" long tail.
• HTTP/3 (QUIC) opted into per-request via URLRequest.assumesHTTP3Capable (falls back to HTTP/2 → HTTP/1.1).
• Checksum verification. SHA-256 / MD5 verified at finalize before the partial is promoted; sourced from a #sha256=… / #md5=… URL fragment or the Add sheet. Mismatch fails the download and keeps the partial.
• Retry-After + jittered backoff. 429/503 honor the server's Retry-After (delta-seconds or HTTP-date); other retries use capped full-jitter exponential backoff to avoid synchronized retry storms.
• Auto-resume on network loss. NWPathMonitor pauses active downloads ("Waiting for network…") and auto-resumes when connectivity returns, instead of burning retries through an outage.
• If-Range changed-file fallback. A server-side file change (validator mismatch) triggers one clean restart-from-scratch instead of a hard failure.
• Bandwidth throttling. Optional global download speed cap (token-bucket RateLimiter), configurable in Settings → Downloads.
• Download priorities. High / Normal / Low queue priority (context-menu), with a stable priority-aware scheduler.
• Completion notifications, configurable request timeout and per-chunk retry count, and HTTP/HTTPS proxy support — all in Settings → Network.
• Continuous disk-space guard. Re-checks free space mid-download and pauses cleanly if the volume fills up.
• Smart file-type icons. The list shows video / audio / image / archive / PDF / doc / code / app / disk icons (tinted by type) with a corner status badge.
• RFC 5987 filenames (filename*=UTF-8''…) and 255-byte NFC-safe filename truncation.
• Copy Diagnostics context action — per-chunk attempts/errors and live concurrency state.

Changed

• Per-chunk retry count and hard cap are now driven by the configurable retry setting (was hardcoded 5 / 25).
• The engine owns its URLSession and rebuilds it when the proxy / timeout settings change.

Tests

• New suites: RetryBackoff, ChecksumVerifier, AdaptiveConcurrency + ChunkPlannerPieceSizing, RateLimiter, DownloadScheduler, FileTypeIcon; extended RangeProbe (RFC 5987) and FilenameResolver (truncation).

1.0.0 — Unreleased

First public release.

Added

• Multi-threaded download engine. Actor-based: DownloadEngine schedules per maxConcurrentDownloads; DownloadCoordinator owns one download's lifecycle (probe → plan → spawn → finalize); ChunkWorker performs one HTTP-Range request per attempt; FileWriter actor serializes positional writes into a sparse partial file.
• Adaptive parallelism. When ≥ 4 chunk attempts in a 10-second window land with < 16 KB of progress, the engine halves its effective worker count, cancels the lowest-progress chunks, and continues. Repeats until stable.
• Per-host parallelism memory (HostCapStore). Learned caps persist to ~/Library/Application Support/Macget/host_caps.json and ratchet downward only.
• Staggered worker spawn (100 ms) so anti-abuse middleboxes see a steady stream rather than a burst of TCP SYNs from one IP.
• App Nap defense. ProcessInfo.beginActivity is held while any download is running; URLSession is configured with networkServiceType = .responsiveData and shouldUseExtendedBackgroundIdleMode = true. Per-task priority set to URLSessionTask.highPriority.
• Smart retry classification. Permanent errors (401/403/404/410/451, range refusals, malformed URLs) fail fast; transient errors (-1005 network connection lost, -1017 cannot parse response, -1011 bad server response, 5xx, 408, 429) retry with exponential backoff. Hard global cap of 25 attempts per chunk.
• Pause / resume across launches. Queue persists to ~/Library/Application Support/Macget/queue.json; chunks resume from nextWriteOffset on relaunch. If-Range validators (ETag / Last-Modified) protect against silent file changes.
• Live thread adjustment (1–16) with ChunkSplitter for adding workers mid-flight.
• Range probe with HEAD then GET Range: bytes=0-0 fallback (some servers 405 on HEAD).
• Filename collision handling: appends (2), (3), … when the destination is taken.
• Disk-space pre-check (refuses if file > 95 % of free space at destination).
• Native SwiftUI UI with @MainActor @Observable view models.
• NSServices, drag-and-drop, clipboard watch, macget:// URL scheme for adding downloads from anywhere.
• Sparkle wrapper behind #if canImport(Sparkle) so the app builds without the dependency until you add it.
• 46 unit tests across ChunkPlanner, ChunkSplitter, SpeedMeter, FilenameResolver, RetryClassification, and HostCapStore.

Configuration

• Default thread count: 8 per download.
• Maximum thread count: 16 per download (industry standard; matches aria2's hardcoded ceiling).
• Default max concurrent downloads: 3.
• Minimum macOS: 26.4 Tahoe.

Known limitations

• Per-host caps only ratchet downward. If a host loosens its limits, you'll need to delete ~/Library/Application Support/Macget/host_caps.json to rediscover. A "Forget host limits" UI action is on the roadmap.
• Bandwidth competition with other apps is fundamental TCP fairness — Macget signals high QoS but cannot override the OS / network layer.