The Main navigation area provides access to the different pages of the interface. The following pages are present in the interface:
Documentation » Graphical User Interface
Describe installation-related topics here.
Hydranode user interface is divided into three major sections, five pages and
plugin pages. The main layout of the application is as follows:
The Main navigation area provides access to the different
pages of the interface. The following pages are present in the interface:
The largest area of this page in the upper left is dedicated to news feeds
from various news sites. The active feed can be selected from the Feeds
button on the Action Bar. In version 0.3.0 of Hydranode, there are five
default feeds available; future versions of the application will include
support for adding user-defined RSS feeds to the listing.
The bottom left area contains one special feed - from Hydranode Developer's
Diary; look here for latest news and current active topics of Hydranode
development and discuss future development directions.
The right side of the page contains overview of current Hydranode activity and
statistics. The graph displays recent download rates. It should be noted that
the graph is auto-scaling based on recent download rate values, so it provides
only a general indication of whether Hydranode is downloading slow or fast.
The graph is averaged to session average rate, so medium-sized bars indicate
that current download rate is near session average rates. Below the graph there
is a more detailed list of values, such as amount downloaded/uploaded during
this session/overall, and other related values.
Below the My Hydranode box there is a clickable link named 'Support
Hydranode Development', which can be used to donate money via PayPal to
support the continued Hydranode development.
Clicking on the Plugins button on the Action Bar opens a drop-down menu
of plugins that have additional data to display. In version 0.3.0 of
Hydranode, only eDonkey plugin has extra data to display - namely, server
list. In the future, the list of plugins is expected to increase, such as IRC
chat plugin or DirectConnect hub listing.
eDonkey2000 page TODO: Update screenshot
This page lists the currently known servers for the eDonkey2000 network.
The Search page of the application provides functionality to find files on
supported file-sharing networks. A search can be started by typing the
keywords into the white text-box on Action Bar and hitting the 'Enter' key or
clicking on the 'Search' button. It can take up to 10 seconds for the results
to arrive, longer for rare keywords. After the initial results arrive,
searching continues automatically, so more results can arrive later from
remote servers.
For popular keywords, it is common to get hundreds of results back, which can
be confusing. To counter that, you can select the type of the file from the
Type drop-down menu left of the search keywords box. Note that the type must
be selected before starting the search, and selecting type with existing
results in the list has no effect. Additionally, you can specify the minimum
and maximum file sizes (in MB's), in the boxes right from the 'Search' button.
To clear the search result listing, click on the 'Clear' button at the right
side of the Action Bar.
More details about search results can be enabled in the list by right-clicking
on the list header and enabling more columns. The list can also be sorted by
clicking on the column headers.
By default, the results are sorted by Availability column, which provides an
indication of how fast the file will be downloaded. Generally, files with
availability below 10 (about half of the bar's maximum width) are considered
rare can take very long time to download (more than a week). Also, watch
out for results for which the bar is red - those files are not guaranteed to
complete downloading at all, since only part of the file is available on the
network. As a general rule, don't start downloading results for which the bar
is red.
The Transfer page is the most complicated, feature-rich and most used page of
the interface. Despite to what the name suggests, at the time of this writing
only incoming transfers, e.g. downloads, are displayed on this page. There is
support for importing downloads from other programs, filtering the list by
file types/keywords, grouping related downloads into categories and even
viewing extended data and comments about specific files.
The Action Bar on Transfer page contains the following controls:
Add drop-down menu contains three entries - From File allows
starting downloads from files which contain download descriptions, such as
.torrent's, or files containing a list of links to be downloaded (ed2k://
for example); From Clipboard allows copying links from websites or
chatrooms and starting downloads from them; behavior is identical to
hitting Ctrl+V on transfer page; Import attempts to import
foreign download formats (such as eMule or MLDonkey formats) into
Hydranode. The default importing behavior is to create
Hydranode-compatible download description file (.dat) at the original
location of the temporary files, so no physical data copying occurs and
importing is very fast; however this means that you cannot run Hydranode
and the original owner of those downloads simultaneously anymore (since
they would write to same underlying files). If this is not what you want,
make a copy of the foreign Temporary directory before importing it into
Hydranode.
Status drop-down menu allows changing the status of downloads.
A paused download is not being downloaded and no new sources are being
searched for, however existing sources are kept. A stopped download is
similar to a paused download, but existing sources are also dropped,
freeing up the resources used by them. Resuming a download reverts the
Pause or Stop operations, and the download will continue transferring.
Canceling a download means removing the temporary data from disk and
completely "forgetting" about this file. If you cancel a download and
re-add it later, the transferring will start from the beginning - all
previously-downloaded data is lost.
On the far right side on the Action bar there is a set of controls, commonly
called FilterBox. It consists of a Type drop-down menu, which
should be familiar already from the Search Page, a text input box and the
Filter Button. Selecting a type from the drop-down causes only files
of that type to be displayed in the list. Entering keywords into the text
input box causes only files matching those keywords to be displayed; note that
matching is done on word-by-word basis, thus "Knoppix DVD" matches a file
named "Knoppix.[DVD].iso". Clicking on the Filter Button toggles current
filter on and off. Pressing the Esc key on the keyboard while in the
text input box also clears the filter.
The Download List contains the list of files currently being downloaded. By
default, the following columns are shown:
Note about Bittorrent: In version 0.3.0 of Hydranode, all files within
the torrent display as red, while the parent file representing the entire
torrent can be marked as red; this is a bug in Hydranode, and the torrent
files can be completed as long as the parent file's bar is completely
green/blue.
TODO: CommentBox screenshot
Right-clicking on any list item opens a popup menu which provides access to
some more advanced functionality. In addition to duplicating the functionality
accessible from the Status menu on Action Bar (e.g. pausing, stopping,
resuming and canceling), it also provides Set Destination... item,
which can be used to select where to move this file once the download is
completed; Cleanup file name renames the file and replaces all dots,
hyphens (-) and other separators with spaces; and perhaps the most useful of
these, Show Comments opens a dock window which displays the known file
names and comments about the file; this feature can be used to detect fake
files - if the file names found by Hydranode differ strongly from the file
name displayed in the list, there is a high chance that the file
is not what is expected.
The Categories functionality in Hydranode provides a method for organizing
related downloads into groups which can be manipulated as one. A category
supports all the functions that separate downloads support, such as pausing,
resuming, stopping, cancelling and setting destination directory; in case of
a category, these operations affect all files in the category. The categories
functionality is most useful when one has many downloads and wishes to get
a better overview and gain more control over the download list.
There are two types of categories in Hydranode - user-defined categories
and application-defined categories. An example of application-defined category
is multi-file Bittorrent download. User-defined and application-defined
categories behave mostly the same way; the only difference is that you cannot
assign and unassign files to/from an application-defined category (e.g. you
cannot add a file into a torrent download, nor can you remove a file from
the torrent). However, you can perform all standard operations on files
belonging to an application-defined category, such as pausing, canceling or
setting a custom destination for a file within a torrent.
A category can only be created from the Action Bar on Transfer page; a
category can only be removed by right-clicking on it on Transfer page and
selecting Remove Category. If the category being removed has files
assigned to it, the files will become unassigned or
uncategorized.
To assign a file into a category, right-click on it and select the name of
the category from the menu; if you have more than five categories defined, the
categories list opens as a sub-menu from the right-click menu.
Categories can also be nested within each other, so that you can have an
Audio category, and within that a category for different artists. In case of
such nested categories, performing an operation on top-level category (in this
case, the Audio category) applies the operation to all sub-categories and
in the sub-categories; performing an operation on a sub-category only affects
files within that sub-category.
Categories information is stored within the files over sessions, and also
shared with the Library page of the user interface, so the file remains within
the category even after the download has finished and the file has been
cleared from the Transfer view.
A category is indicated with a 
or
icon in the Transfer and Library pages,
depending whether the category contents are displayed or not. Clicking on the
icon toggles displaying the contents as a tree and hiding the contents.
Describe LIBRARY page here.
Describe SETTINGS page here.
Describe files and folders used by Hydranode here.
Describe frameless mode and gui.ini settings here.