Roboget is a new program downloader for Windows

Roboget is a new program for Windows designed to make the downloading of multiple software programs for the operating system easier. The program resembles others of its kind, e.g. Ninite or Silent Install Helper, which provide similar functionality.

The application is available as a beta at the time of writing, and some things may not work as intended as a consequence. I did not run into any major issues during tests but it still may be a good idea to wait until the first final version is released before running the program on production machines.

Roboget displays the supported programs that you can download in the interface on start. Note that the program does not need to be installed and that it should run fine on all recent versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Version 0.2.6 of the program featured 57 different Windows programs including all-time favorites such as Foobar2000, AIMP, 7-Zip, MusicBee, Thunderbird, or Process Explorer. A click on any program displays information about in directly. You get a short description, compatibility information, tags, and download links listed after selecting a program. Roboget reveals if a program is portable and whether it is installed already.

The download links may be used to download a specific program manually, but the main use of Roboget is that you can select multiple programs to download them all in one operation.  There is also a "select all" option to check all programs, but most users probably won't find that too useful.

The program lacks categories at the time of writing but options to integrate those are already present. It would be useful to filter programs by category, e.g. multimedia, Internet, or productivity.

One of the shortcomings of the beta version of Roboget is that it does not reveal the size of individual programs or the total size of all selected programs. It would be useful if the program would show the size as users may want to know about it before starting the download operation.

A click on "get all" downloads all selected programs using Wget by default. Each program is downloaded individually to the application's directory on the system. Note that each download spawns its own command window which get terminated when downloads complete.

Wget is the default but options are provided to switch to Curl or JDownloader instead if available in the settings of the program.

Closing words

Roboget is available as a beta version; the application looks promising but there is definitely room for improvement. For now, it is a program to keep an eye on to see how it evolves over time.

Now You: do you use software downloaders or do you download everything manually instead?

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