The sections on email were easy to write because I have a strong opinion about which email program I think is best. In the realm of newsreaders for Usenet news, the field is a little smaller, but much stronger. I currently know of a number of MacTCP-based newsreading solutions, and three of them are neck and neck. Of the freeware and shareware, I prefer NewsWatcher, developed by John Norstad of Disinfectant fame. However, there's a lot to like about Nuntius, from Peter Speck. And confusing the issue is a commercial program, NewsHopper, which is excellent and is the only one that supports offline newsreading. In the end, I think you must try all three (there's a demo for NewsHopper available for FTP) and decide for yourself, because each one brings a different interface philosophy and design to the task of reading news. I'll discuss them in roughly the order in which I suggest you check them out, placing NewsHopper last only because it's commercial and thus has a higher cost of entry than the others.
Note: Since you can try all the main newsreaders for free, I recommend that you form your own opinion and don't clog the nets with questions asking which newsreaders people like best. Newsreaders are very personal programs, and only you can decide which is right for you.
The major challenge that the newsreaders face is presenting a clean and quick method of navigating through gobs of information. Interface is all-important (and a purely personal choice, of course), but raw speed doesn't hurt either, and NewsWatcher feels fast. Steve Falkenburg of Apple first created NewsWatcher, and John Norstad later picked it up to continue development. John has gone nuts with NewsWatcher and made the current version, 2.0b24 (don't be scared off by the b24 bit since NewsWatcher is very stable) into one of the best Internet programs available today.
When you launch NewsWatcher for the very first time, it asks if you plan to use NewsWatcher on your own, on a shared Mac with someone else who will use NewsWatcher, or in lab situation. The answer to this question determines how NewsWatcher sets up your preferences. If you choose Private, NewsWatcher creates your preferences in the Preferences folder. If you choose Shared, NewsWatcher prompts you to name a folder in which it will store your personal preferences. And finally, if you click on Lab, NewsWatcher prompts you to insert a floppy disk on which it will store your preferences.
Note: Because NewsWatcher supports Internet Config (see chapter 27, "Utilities & Miscellany"), if you have already configured Internet Config completely (and it's included on the disk so you can do this), you won't have to fill in the basic settings discussed below -- they'll already be present. Internet Config is a good thing.
Once you've determined how you will use NewsWatcher, it prompts you for five pieces of information, three of which are required and two of which are optional. First, it asks for the addresses of your news server and your mail server (see figure 22.1), which are required.
Figure 22.1: NewsWatcher Server Addresses configuration dialog.
The only way to figure out these addresses is to ask your system administrator. After you fill them in and click on the OK button, NewsWatcher presents another similar dialog that asks for your full name, your organization, and your email address. It requires only the last of the three, but there's no reason not to input the others (see figure 22.2).
Figure 22.2: NewsWatcher Personal Information dialog.
After you enter all that information, NewsWatcher goes out to your server and downloads the full group list, the huge list of all the newsgroups available on your site. Downloading this list takes a long time, possibly as long as 10 or 20 minutes over a 2,400 bps modem! Be prepared to wait, but don't worry. As long as you don't throw out the NewsWatcher Preferences file in your Preferences folder, NewsWatcher never again has to download all the groups. If NewsWatcher does try to download the full group list on future launches, check to make sure an anti-virus program or something else hasn't prevented NewsWatcher from properly creating its NewsWatcher Prefs file.
Note: Some people report NewsWatcher crashing or having other problems as it attempts to sort the full group list. In many cases, this is caused by NewsWatcher not having enough memory to deal with so many newsgroups. If you have this problem, in the Finder select the NewsWatcher icon, choose Get Info from the File menu, and increase the Preferred memory size by a few hundred kilobytes.
After you have the massively long list of all the groups onscreen, from the File menu choose New Group Window. NewsWatcher then opens a small, empty window. Scroll through the Full Group List (if you accidentally close it or want to add groups again later, look for Show Full Group List under the Windows menu) and drag interesting groups over to the small, empty window. Don't worry about the order; you can drag groups within that window to put them in the right order after you're finished subscribing to groups. Eventually, you have a nice set of groups to read. From the File menu, choose Save and then name your group list whatever you want (see figure 22.3).
Figure 22.3: NewsWatcher group list.
That's about it. You're ready to read news, although you may want to configure some more preferences first. If you select Preferences from the File menu, NewsWatcher presents you with a dialog containing some general options (see figure 22.4). At the top of the dialog is a pop-up menu that lists other types of preferences you can set, such as the location to save files, your signature for postings, the font and size for viewing articles and lists, and various other settings. Some of these match the settings from Internet Config; others are specific to NewsWatcher.
Figure 22.4: NewsWatcher's many preferences.
To read a newsgroup in your list, double-click on it or use one of the keypad shortcuts (if you have them enabled from the Preferences dialog). NewsWatcher opens another window containing the subjects of all the articles in the group, and alongside each subject is either a dash or a triangle and number (see figure 22.5).
Figure 22.5: NewsWatcher newsgroup and article windows.
The dash indicates that the article is the only one in the thread, the triangle indicates that there are more than one, and the number indicates how many articles are in that thread. You can click on the triangle to show the other articles, just as you click on a triangle in the System 7 Finder to display a folder's contents. I sometimes leave the option that displays author names turned off, because NewsWatcher draws windows much faster that way. If you choose not to download author names, there's no reason to expand a thread with the triangle control, since all the articles have the same subject and thus look identical.
Double-clicking on an article subject in the newsgroup window opens a window (see figure 22.5 again) that NewsWatcher sizes to the article to prevent unnecessary scrolling. However, if you click on the little lock icon in the lower left-hand corner of the window, NewsWatcher uses that window size until you unlock the icon. With an article window open, you can go to the next article, next thread, or next group (marking the current group as read) with keyboard shortcuts or, if you have them turned on in the preferences, a keypad shortcut. I prefer using the keypad shortcuts because reading news should be an easy process, and using a Command-key combination is too hard for hundreds of repetitions. That's especially true for those of us with repetitive stress injuries.
In NewsWatcher, you also can reply to an article via email or post a follow-up to the newsgroup using commands in the News menu. Useful icons at the top of the reply window let you specify if the reply should go to the newsgroup, to the poster or another email address that you can enter, or to your email account if you wanted to save a copy yourself (see figure 22.6).
Figure 22.6: NewsWatcher reply window.
When you're back in a newsgroup window, you also can quickly mark articles as read or unread, which can be handy for getting through a group quickly. That's about all there is to reading news with NewsWatcher -- it's an elegant program.
Note: You might try selecting all the articles in the group with Select All, then holding down the Command key and clicking on the ones you want to read to deselect them. Then, from the News menu, choose Mark Read, which puts a check mark next to each of the still-selected uninteresting articles. Now you can select the first article in the group and read straight through without being bothered by any of the uninteresting stuff.
NewsWatcher feels fast, clean, and easy to use, which is the result of nice touches at every level. I cannot live without keypad shortcuts or the Spacebar shortcut that moves you to the next screen and then to the next unread message, just as in a Unix newsreader.
John removed the capability to move through the massive full group list by typing the first few characters of each part of the newsgroup name, replacing it with a more generic Find function that's more useful and easier to use (since most newsgroups start with the same letters anyway).
Note: NewsWatcher has an interesting feature to open referenced articles, which theoretically enables you to go back in a thread even if you have already marked earlier articles as read. All you must do is Command-click on the message-ID if one exists at the top of the article, although many people edit out the message-ID. Still, it's a nice idea.
John has enhanced this feature so that Command-clicking on an email address opens a new mail window set to send email to that person. Even better, if you Command-click on an FTP URL that someone has included in a posting, NewsWatcher calls either Anarchie or Fetch (you set it) and resolves the URL by retrieving the file or directory. But of course, there are many non-FTP URLs passed around in Usenet news, so NewsWatcher can also pass HTTP URLs to a Web browser such as MacWeb, Gopher URLs to TurboGopher, and so on. Other URLs that John supports include WAIS, Telnet, tn3270, Finger, Whois, and Ph, and you can set the programs to help out in each case.
NewsWatcher has automatic extraction code that enables it to automatically download and decode binary files that are posted -- usually in BinHex or uuencoded form. Even better, NewsWatcher supports Apple's Drag Manager, so you can just drag the icon linked to a binary file to a folder in your Finder, and NewsWatcher downloads it and calls the appropriate programs to decode it.
Drag Manager support extends beyond just downloading binary files, though, so you can drag the contents of any NewsWatcher window to the Finder to create a text clipping, or to another Drag Manager-aware program window to copy the text into that document. Drag Manager support does require System 7.5 or the full set of Drag Manager extensions for System 7.1.1.
For those of you who read news on a Unix machine using rn or nn at work and perhaps use NewsWatcher at home to read news on that same Unix machine, NewsWatcher has a feature that enables you to use the same .newsrc file so that you don't have to duplicate reading effort.
Note: The Remote Host Information preferences control this feature for retrieving the .newsrc file from a Unix shell account. Don't worry about those preferences if you don't also read news under Unix and wish to share the .newsrc file.
The main complaint I can think of in regard to NewsWatcher is that the text window limits prevent you from posting messages larger than 32K. Chalk up another one for Apple's limited TextEdit routines. You can read messages larger than 32K, though, since NewsWatcher displays only 32K at a time and provides a horizontal slider bar to reach additional 32K chunks of the same message. Additional missing features include full filtering and the capability of posting attachments to messages. Both of those limitations are starting to be addressed in a variant of NewsWatcher called Value-Added NewsWatcher (which is otherwise basically the same). See the capsule review following for more information on VA-NewsWatcher.
Overall, though, what can I say? John Norstad has once again provided the Macintosh community with a great freeware program. John's free Disinfectant is wonderful, but I certainly hope that people have more occasion to read news than to search for viruses.
However, I shouldn't imply that NewsWatcher is perfect or, more accurately, complete. John has big plans for NewsWatcher, but because it's a labor of love, he works at his own pace and implements features that he wants or feels that the program needs in order to be complete. Because of this, I always enjoy reading the To Do document, which lists all the wishes and requests for future versions, including my big favorites, offline reading and message filtering based on the contents of the messages or headers.
NewsWatcher 2.0b24 is free, and you can retrieve the latest version from either of the following:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
ftp://ftp.acns.nwu.edu/pub/newswatcher/
The second of the heavy-hitting MacTCP-based newsreaders is Peter Speck's free Nuntius 2.0. Long a favorite of the Usenet crowd, Nuntius combines a Finder-like interface with some clever integration with other programs for mundane tasks such as email and text editing.
The first time you launch Nuntius, it quickly asks for your news server's address (which you get, of course, by bribing your system administrator with chocolate). It then proceeds to retrieve the entire list of newsgroups. This long download happens only the first time you start Nuntius; the program is smart enough to keep that information around for later use.
After it has the entire list of groups, Nuntius opens two windows. One, called All Groups, contains a Finder-like outline of all the groups (see figure 22.7).
Figure 22.7: Nuntius All Groups window.
This method of outlining the hierarchy of new newsgroups works better than the way NewsWatcher and InterNews list them in one big list, simply because the lists are smaller. However, if you know what newsgroup you want, say comp.sys.mac.announce, you must open the comp folder by clicking on its triangle and then open the sys folder and the mac folder before you see the announce newsgroup. It takes a while to open each folder and scroll down to the right spot to open the next one. Although typing a key takes you to a newsgroup starting with that letter, I find that feature slow and awkward.
The second window Nuntius opens is empty and is called Untitled group list 1. When you see an interesting group or groups (you can select more than one at a time) in Nuntius, as in NewsWatcher, you click on them and drag them into the Untitled group list 1 window (which you should immediately save with a different name as in figure 22.8).
Figure 22.8: Nuntius group list window.
In figure 22.8, some of the newsgroups have bullets next to their names, indicating that they have new messages in them. Some newsgroups have question marks next to them because I took this screen shot as Nuntius was querying my news server to see which newsgroups had new articles. Only one group was empty, clari.feature.dave_barry, so that group has nothing next to it.
Note: Unfortunately, clari.feature.dave_barry has been removed from ClariNet by Knight-Ridder (the company that syndicates Dave Barry's columns), reportedly because of copyright violations. "...And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; But there is no joy in Mudville -- Dave Barry has pulled out."
Although they are not necessary for you to start reading news, you can and should set a number of preferences in the Prefs menu (see figure 22.9). Ideally, I'd like to see Peter Speck bring the items in the Prefs menu together in a single dialog -- you don't change preferences often and the menu seems a bit long and unwieldy.
Figure 22.9: Nuntius Prefs menu.
Of the several preferences you can set, the most interesting is the Editing articles item in the Prefs menu. It lets you specify which program you want to use to edit your articles.
As you might expect, double-clicking on a newsgroup name causes Nuntius to open the list of articles in that group. In an interesting and useful twist, Nuntius can open multiple groups at the same time. This feature is especially useful, because Nuntius doesn't seem to work as quickly as NewsWatcher. What you can do is start opening a large group and then open a small group, and have that large group opening in the background as you read the articles in the small group. Even given NewsWatcher's speed, I'd like to see this feature migrate over, because it enables you to work more efficiently.
In any event, opening a newsgroup window displays a window listing the articles in the group (see figure 22.10).
Figure 22.10: Nuntius newsgroup window.
The subject of each message appears on the left, unless the message is in the middle of a thread. This use of white space may seem like a waste, but I think it works well to indicate the relative size of threads. Any subject line changes are indicated by the indented subjects within the thread. The names of the authors of each message appear to the right, preceded by bullets if that article is new. Double-clicking on a thread (Nuntius won't let you read a single article in the middle of a thread) opens the article window (see figure 22.11).
Figure 22.11: Nuntius article window.
Nuntius uses a custom interface for determining what you see and don't see, and it's another reason why you may prefer one newsreader over another. I have Nuntius set to open only the first article in the thread, because there's no point in transferring all that data if the first article proves to be uninteresting. Opening threads of uninteresting articles is especially a problem over a slow link or with a large thread, although you can scroll through the article window as the program fills it. If you have a fast network connection, you probably don't care about this problem as much, and you can set Nuntius to open all articles when opening a thread.
You can select multiple threads in the newsgroup window, and by pressing the Spacebar, you can open them. Repeated presses of the Spacebar move you through all the selected threads. Once you have a number of threads open, you can navigate between them from the article window, either by using the right and left arrow keys or by using the arrows in the lower left of the article window. The down arrow in the article window scrolls down and then takes you to the next thread.
My biggest problem with Nuntius is that I don't want to spend the time opening all the articles in a thread to begin with, but at the same time I want to open the triangles from the keyboard because clicking on them with the mouse is too much work for such a common action. I may be missing something, but I cannot find any way of opening the triangle this way in the scanty documentation or in the good, but spotty, balloon help.
Perhaps the coolest aspect of using Nuntius comes when you want to reply to a letter or post a follow-up. Nuntius doesn't, in fact, know how to do much in terms of sending email or editing text; instead, it asks other applications to perform those tasks. So, if you want to mail a response, Nuntius uses an AppleScript to launch or switch to Eudora 1.5.1, and then fills in the header and quotes the article text in the body of the message. Actually, if you don't select any text in the Nuntius article window, Nuntius passes only the Subject line to Eudora. If you do select some text, Nuntius passes the proper address to send mail to and quotes the text you selected. You have to switch back to Nuntius manually when you're finished sending the message in Eudora.
Note: If you don't have AppleScript installed, Nuntius can still use Eudora to reply via email, but it's an old hack Peter Speck figured out years ago. It may not work as well as the AppleScript method.As cool as that setup is, I prefer the way Nuntius calls another program to edit follow-up posts. I live in Nisus Writer, and using any other text editor or word processor, even on the Mac, irritates me to no end because none of them, in my opinion, provides a comparable set of features for writing and editing text. So, whenever I post an article from Nuntius, I get to edit that article in Nisus Writer. (Note that if you use a word processor other than Nisus, you probably must save your files as text if you use a word processor that doesn't use text files as its native format.)
This technique does have drawbacks. You must have enough memory to run both programs at once, and you must use Eudora to send mail. But even with these limitations (which don't bother me at all, since I have enough RAM and I use Eudora anyway), I'd like to see more programs follow this method of working. The trick with editing files isn't even all that fancy. Nuntius saves a file with the information to be edited (on the desktop or some other folder you set); then it asks the Finder to open that document with the editor you defined. After you're finished editing, you normally save and close the file. Then you manually switch back to Nuntius, which waits patiently for you to finish and then asks if you want to post that article. To avoid clutter, you can click on a checkbox to trash the temporary file when you're finished. I see no reason why other programs couldn't use this technique, although Nisus Writer is especially well-suited to it because its native file format is straight text.
Aside from Nuntius's extremely cool method of sending mail and posting follow-ups, it has several features that set it apart from the crowd. The Spacebar works as it does in Unix newsreaders -- as a kind of magic key that performs the most likely next action. Unfortunately, I wanted it to open the next closed triangle in an article window, and it didn't do that, so for me the magic disappeared at that point.
Nuntius takes the concept of resolving URLs one step further than even NewsWatcher. When Nuntius brings in articles in a thread, it searches for any URLs in the article and makes them hot, just as in a Web browser. They even come in as blue and underlined, also just like a Web browser. There's no need to Command-click; an unmodified click works fine to resolve a large number of URL types.
Although Nuntius does an excellent job of grouping articles into threads, the most recent versions also sort them alphabetically, which I happen to like, although I could see where others would prefer a chronological sort, as NewsWatcher does.
In Nuntius, you can set the font and size for any of its windows with the Font and Size menus in the Prefs menu, and those settings apply to all newsgroup and article windows. Of all the newsreaders, Nuntius has the most control over which threads it displays, enabling you to show all threads, threads updated today, threads with unread articles, or threads with new articles. You can choose among these threads from the Threads menu. A similar set of commands in the Articles menu enables you to expand all articles, the first article, new articles, unread articles, or no articles. Unfortunately, there aren't keyboard shortcuts for these commands; adding them might be a partial solution to my complaint about not being able to expand articles from the keyboard easily.
Nuntius is Power Mac-native, and combined with its capability to bring in multiple groups at once and automatically update them while you're reading something else, it's definitely one of the quickest of the newsreaders.
Despite my love affair with its method of using other programs for mail and editing and its clever method of multitasking different actions so that you can work more efficiently, Nuntius simply doesn't make it for me. If there were a better way of just zipping through a set of articles without mucking with the mouse or waiting for Nuntius to transfer the full text of each article, I might use it over NewsWatcher.
Nuntius has essentially no documentation, although Aaron Freimark has done a lot of work in creating a FAQ and maintains a Web site with information about the program. Nuntius does come with a notes document that lists some hidden keyboard shortcuts and version changes, but that's it. The balloon help is useful, although not as obviously great as in Eudora. Support is primarily available by asking questions on comp.sys.mac.comm -- the Nuntius mailing list was disbanded because all the traffic was on the newsgroup.
Finally, I've had more trouble with Nuntius crashing than I did with either InterNews or NewsWatcher. Your mileage may vary with a different machine, network connection, and set of extensions.
Nuntius is free, and you can find the latest versions of Nuntius at the following FTP sites and more information at the Web site:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/
http://guru.med.cornell.edu/~aaron/nuntius/nuntius.html