A quick request to the technologically adept

Would someone please build a nice new front-end for Azureus? It's the only Bittorrent client that meets my (very reasonable) needs: OSX-compatible, allows partial downloading, handles things like tracker announcements and protocol encryption properly. But it's written in Java, and as a result the interface is cumbersome, unMaclike, and downright ugly.



The only solution I've found is the FireFrog plugin, which replaces the main Azureus window with an alternative based on the Firefox downloads window (that miracle of user-experience design). It's an improvement, but it also features one of the dumbest interface elements I've ever seen: the FireFrog menubar icon.



That's FireFrog on the left, then Azureus. (Beautiful icons too, right?)

So what incredibly useful commands do the FireFrog developers think I should have immediate access to at all times via the menubar? Let's click on it and see.



Yup, clicking -- the universal method of accessing a menubar item on the Mac -- does absolutely nothing. To get the menu, I have to right-click -- or, since I'm on a MacBook and MacBooks don't have right-click buttons, I have to Control-click. This behavior is so counterintuitive that I forget about it every time, even when all I'm doing is making screenshots for this blog post, the point of which is to complain about the stupid menubar. If anyone remembers to do it during ordinary use, my hat is off to them.

So what treasures do we find when we right-click?



Hmm .. two commands ("Open FireFrog" and "Exit FireFrog and Azureus") and two submenus ("Transfers" and "Advanced Options"). What's in the submenus?



That's right -- the "Transfers" submenu contains just two commands. What about the "Advanced Options" submenu?



It contains one (1) command -- the command that returns you to the regular Azureus interface. (Turning the plugin on and off is apparently "advanced.") Think about it for a second: in what possible scenario would it be useful to have a submenu containing just one item?

So the menu contains five commands -- a number so staggeringly high that the designers had to put them into two submenus just to avoid clutter. And to get to that "Show Azureus" command depicted above, I have to go through the following steps: click on the menubar icon; wonder why nothing's happening; read the little tooltip telling me to right-click; Control-click on the menubar icon; wonder where the "Show Azureus" command is; try the "Advanced Options" submenu; click on "Show Azureus." That's seven steps. In a sane interface I'd click on the menubar icon, then click on the "Show Azureus" command: two steps.

All this in a plugin that's meant to simplify the Azureus interface. Again: would someone who actually knows something about design please build a new front-end for this program?

________
UPDATE: An earlier version of this post mistakenly claimed that both the Azureus and the FireFrog icons can't be removed from the menubar. Thanks to Olivier for correcting me via the comments.