In the second edition of the book, Laurent Humbert, who wrote NewsHopper, asked me not to say anything about NewsHopper, which wasn't quite ready for prime time. Now it is, and especially in the most recent version 1.1, NewsHopper has become one of the best of the MacTCP-based newsreaders. The two features that set it apart from all the others are excellent support for offline newsreading and good filtering.
NewsHopper doesn't force you to work through any immediate setup upon startup; instead, after you launch the program, you must create a new newsfile by selecting New from the File menu. At that point, NewsHopper starts asking configuration questions, but if you've previously configured Internet Config, NewsHopper can retrieve all of your settings from Internet Config's database. One way or another, you first see a dialog asking for the name of your news server (see figure 22.12). After that, NewsHopper presents you with a standard file dialog so you can name and save the folder that contains all of your settings. Once you've saved that folder, NewsHopper opens your News window and another dialog asking for your real name, your organization, and your email address (see figure 22.13).
Figure 22.12: NewsHopper news server configuration.
Figure 22.13: NewsHopper UserID configuration.
NewsHopper has several other sets of preferences in the hierarchical Settings menu under the Edit menu which aren't governed by Internet Config, things like whether or not you want to use an external text editor, if you want to ignore confirmation alerts, and if windows should avoid hiding the Finder's icons. Also included are options for saving window positions, showing complete addresses for the senders, and marking articles as "not new" automatically. Needless to say, none of these settings are in the slightest bit necessary -- worry about them after you've used NewsHopper a bit.
After working through the basic settings -- which is as easy as accepting the existing settings if you've configured Internet Config -- you're left with a News window. At this point, there are two basic ways of subscribing to newsgroups. If you know the exact names of the groups you want to read, choose Subscribe from the Groups menu (see figure 22.14) and enter the name of the newsgroup. I usually set NewsHopper to fetch all new items, to fetch subjects and authors only (since that's the beauty of NewsHopper's offline capabilities), and to sort the threads alphabetically. However, with very low-volume groups such as comp.sys.mac.announce and rec.humor.funny, I have NewsWatcher bring in the articles themselves on the first pass, since it's easier.
Figure 22.14: NewsHopper subscribe window.
When you click on the OK button, NewsHopper enters that newsgroup in your News window. Frankly, this is all I've done for the way I use NewsHopper, because I know full well which groups I want to read by now. However, if you don't know which groups you want to read, you must tell NewsHopper to fetch the list of all groups, which requires making a connection.
From the File menu, choose Connect, and in the dialog that appears, check the Fetch List Of All Groups checkbox (see figure 12.15). Make sure you have a connection to the Internet established if you're using SLIP or PPP, and then click on the OK button. NewsHopper goes out to your news server and brings in the full list of newsgroups (on my server, with about 6,000 groups, NewsHopper brought in about 285K of data during that time).
Figure 22.15: NewsHopper Connect dialog.
There's not much that you can do in NewsHopper right now because you don't have any groups configured yet, but if you did, you could be reading or replying to articles. NewsHopper is extremely good about establishing connections and working in the background, so you can keep reading. Once NewsHopper has finished, you can hang up your Internet connection if you wish, and then choose List Of All Groups from the Windows menu to bring up the window showing all the groups (see figure 22.16).
Figure 22.16: NewsHopper List Of All Groups.
You can scroll around and select multiple groups, or you can type a search string in the text field at the top and click on the Find button. When you click on the Subscribe button, NewsHopper adds the selected groups to your News window.
Note: NewsHopper makes you choose the options for all of the selected groups at the same time; however, you can easily change the settings for how many articles to bring in or whatever later by selecting the group in the News window and choosing Settings from the Groups menu.
So now that you've subscribed to a number of groups, let's fill them with articles. From the File menu, choose Connect again. This time, Fetch List Of All Groups will have changed (since you've already gotten the list) to Check For New Groups. Leave that selected if you like, but also check Fetch New Articles. Make sure you're connected to the Internet and click on the OK button. NewsHopper connects to your news server and retrieves the subjects and authors for the articles in the newsgroups to which you've subscribed (see figure 22.17).
Figure 22.17: NewsHopper News window.
Once it's done, you can again disconnect from the Internet -- keeping your bills low if you're charged by the hour or calling long distance. Even though NewsHopper moves right along, if you've selected several high-volume groups, it can still take a while to download just the subjects and authors. Be glad you aren't trying to download all of the articles as well.
To read articles in a newsgroup, simply double-click on the newsgroup in your News window. NewsHopper brings up a window listing all the articles (see figure 22.18). Remember that we don't yet have any of the articles themselves, just the subjects and authors. So, the next step is to mark the articles you want to read. Double-clicking on an article marks it with a checkbox, or you can select a number at a time and from the Articles menu, use the Attributes hierarchical menu to choose Marked ([Cmd]-M is a lot easier).
Figure 22.18: NewsHopper Articles window.
That's still a bit of work, though, so let's create some filters to do this for us. For instance, I want to read everything that Laurent Humbert posts, because he's likely to say interesting things about NewsHopper, being the author. So, select an article from him, if you happen to see one. Or, you could use the Find command from the Edit menu to search for his name, at which point NewsHopper would display just the articles that match (you can use the Display pop-up menu at the top of the window listing all the articles to switch back to viewing all the articles).
Once you have an article from Laurent selected, from the Articles menu choose Add Filter For Author. NewsHopper brings up the Filter dialog box, mostly filled in for you (see figure 22.19).
Figure 22.19: NewsHopper Filter window.
As you can see, you can search in the various parts of the article and either in specific newsgroups or in all newsgroups via the pop-up Search In menu. Most important, though, are the Delete, Highlight, and Mark For Download checkboxes. If you never want to see anything from Laurent, you could check Delete. If you just want to see which articles he's posted, you could just check Highlight and then, when you were browsing, it would be easy to see his articles. However, if you want to read everything he posts, check Mark For Download so his articles are automatically downloaded for you on the next NewsHopper run.
Note: Of course, you can create filters that work on variables other than the name of the poster, although I find filtering on the posters' names to work well for me. Keywords in the Subject lines always seem to bring in too much garbage for my tastes -- perhaps I'm just not good enough at creating them.
To actually apply the filters you've created (you can have NewsHopper do it automatically for future runs), close the articles window, select one or more newsgroups in the News window, and from the Groups menu choose Apply Filter.
Once you've selected all the articles you want to download, either manually or through filters, again choose Connect from the File menu, select Fetch Marked References (deselect the others for the fastest run), connect to the Internet, and click on the button to make NewsHopper go out and get the articles you marked. When it's done, disconnect from the Internet and double-click on a group that has articles in it in the News window. You probably still have all the article references listed that you didn't download; to hide those, choose Articles from the Display pop-up menu at the top of the window. Finally, double-click on an article in the list to bring up the article reading window (see figure 22.20).
Figure 22.20: NewsHopper Article Viewer window.
NewsHopper has a spartan reading interface, and I hope Laurent adds some additional navigation features in future versions. As it stands, the up and down arrow button in the upper right-hand corner of the article window move you to the previous or next article, and the Spacebar also takes you to the next article. There's no way to move to the next thread if the current one proves boring, but you can delete it instantly with the Delete Thread command in the Articles menu.
If you want to reply by email or forward the text to another person, those commands in the Articles menu send the proper email address, the Subject, and the quoted text of the article (or just the selection, if you don't want to quote the entire article) to Eudora. As with Nuntius, I think it makes sense to use Eudora's skills with email rather than trying to duplicate the functionality in NewsHopper. In addition, that way all my outgoing replies end up with the rest of my saved outgoing mail in Eudora.
Creating a follow-up is similar, but NewsHopper retains control, first asking you about the Subject, newsgroup, and distribution, and then creating the follow-up in a separate text window (see figure 22.21).
Figure 22.21: NewsHopper follow-up windows.
Of course, just as with the rest of NewsHopper's features, the follow-up or any new article, once you're done editing, is placed in an Outbasket and waits until you make another connection.
It's a little hard to point to special features in NewsHopper, because its main features, offline newsreading and filtering, are so incredibly useful that they overshadow plenty of other nice touches. For instance, NewsHopper is excellent about quoting only a selection when you reply, forward, or follow up to an article, something that other programs such as NewsWatcher and Eudora can do, but only as a modified command.
I appreciate the little Bytes Received status line at the bottom of NewsHopper's status window because it gives me an idea of how much data I'm getting myself in for. Also, since I use a dedicated Internet connection, I can't see the modem lights flashing to see that things are working, so I appreciate the constant reminder.
As I said before, NewsHopper is excellent about multitasking, so you can continue to read and reply to articles even as it's going out to retrieve more or to send your replies. This is probably due to its support for Apple's Thread Manager, and folks with Power Macs will appreciate the native code when filtering or performing other CPU-intensive tasks.
For people like me who are constantly seeing little useful bits of information, NewsHopper has an Add To Clippings File command in the Edit menu. Choosing Clippings File in the Windows menu brings up a small text editing window that shows your clippings, separated by three bullets on a line.
If you want to save an entire article, consider clicking on the little padlock icon in the lower left-hand corner of the article window. That locks the article and prevents it from being deleted later on.
Speaking of deletion, since you're downloading all these articles to your hard disk, you will want to recover disk space at some point, and for that NewsHopper has a Purge command that gets rid of uninteresting article references, articles you've read, articles that you've extracted, archives, or just articles that have hung around for too long (see figure 22.22). Also, even purging the messages doesn't actually remove them from your newsfile for efficiency reasons. For that, you should choose Compact from the File menu or let NewsHopper do it when you quit.
Figure 22.22: NewsHopper Purge dialog.
Although NewsHopper currently supports only FTP URLs (support for others is slated for a minor upgrade soon), if you select an FTP URL and choose Create URL from the File menu, it creates a bookmark file for use with Anarchie or Fetch. If you happen to be online, hold down the Option key as you save the URL to have Anarchie or Fetch (as set in Internet Config) resolve the URL immediately.
NewsHopper's Find command, which presents a restricted view of the messages available in a newsgroup, works extremely well for the way I read news, since I often want to do some ad hoc queries. It's too easy to be overwhelmed by several hundred messages in a window.
Overall, I'm extremely impressed with NewsHopper. Even though I use a dedicated Internet connection now, I still read news with NewsHopper, mostly because of the filtering and searching capabilities.
That's not to say that there isn't room for improvement, though. NewsHopper could still use a more streamlined interface for actually reading news, with keyboard shortcuts for moving around in the threads. I'd also like to see it save bookmark files for MacWeb for non-FTP URLs. And finally, I'd like to see the Find functionality move right into the article list window itself, rather than be separated out in a different dialog. That way it would be even easier to perform ad hoc searches for specific topics or posters.
NewsHopper's documentation is good, although I can't say that I've read most of it because the program is fairly easy to figure out once you get the hang of the procedure for doing something, connecting, disconnecting, doing something else, and repeating the process all over again.
NewsHopper is commercial software (£39, with 20 percent educational discounts) from SW15 Software, who you can contact at nh@sw15.demon.co.uk or by phone in the U.K. at (+44)-181-813-6027 or (+44)-181-561-2879 (fax). Orders other than from the United States and Canada should go to SW15 Software. In the U.S. and Canada, NewsHopper is distributed by LandWare for $59 (plus $4.50 shipping and handling via Priority Mail). You can contact LandWare at landware@planet.net or at 800-526-3977, 201-347-0031, or 201-347-0340 (fax). However, you can download a demo of NewsHopper 1.1 that is limited only by being restricted to five newsgroups and not running in Power Mac-native mode. You can get a copy of the latest version from:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/