InterNews from Dartmouth College provides yet another interface for reading news, presenting you with a three-paned window that displays a list of newsgroups, a list of subjects in the selected group, and the articles in a selected thread, all at the same time. If you Command-Option-click on an FTP URL in a message, InterNews can use Anarchie or Fetch to retrieve the file. Unfortunately, InterNews doesn't yet support other applications for resolving other types of URLs. One relatively serious limitation in InterNews is that you cannot receive or send an article larger than 32K. InterNews is a fine effort, though, and much of its interface is well done. InterNews is free for educational and nonprofit users, $25 shareware for others

ftp://ftp.dartmouth.edu/pub/mac/

MacSlurp works by connecting to a specified NNTP server and downloading all the articles in the groups that you specify in your slurp.sys file, which is a specially formatted file that must live in your MacSlurp Files folder in your MacSlurp folder. Once MacSlurp has downloaded all of the messages in a newsgroup, you can set ToadNews to unbatch them (ToadNews is discussed in more detail in chapter 15, "UUCP Access"), and once ToadNews has unbatched the news articles, you can use rnMac or TheNews (again, both discussed in chapter 15) to read the news. MacSlurp can also download the news in a format that UUCP/Connect can read, at which point you don't need the combination of ToadNews and rnMac.

The major problem with MacSlurp (other than it doesn't currently work with news servers like mine) is that it's indiscriminate. If you ask it to retrieve comp.sys.mac.comm, it goes out and downloads all the articles in that group, regardless of whether or not it could take two hours because of all the new messages. You must spend the downloading time and have the disk storage space for all the articles, which isn't efficient if you only wanted to read a few in that group.

NewsFetcher is a free HyperCard-based news transport agent from JÖrg ShÄffer. It's quite limited and a bit clunky in terms of interface, but it provide a potentially useful way of reading news offline. NewsFetcher first retrieves subject lines in specified groups. You then select the subjects you wish to read, and it goes out and retrieves those articles. NewsFetcher doesn't attempt to read the articles on its own at all, but instead saves them in a special format that Akif Eyler's Easy View text browser (see the capsule review in chapter 21, "Email") can read. Easy View is a great program for browsing text, although it would be nice if NewsFetcher had an option for not downloading the complete headers of the messages. NewsFetcher, although it does have minimal posting abilities, doesn't work well if you post frequently. If you're more of a lurker, though, NewsFetcher is fine. I won't pretend that NewsFetcher is an ideal offline newsreading solution, but it is free.

NewsGrazer (which also seems to go by the names NetNews Filter Agent and NetNews Grazer) is a free set of AppleScripts from John Schettino that communicate with an NNTP server, checking for new messages in specified groups and scanning for search terms in the subject lines of the messages. That's actually the task of the NetNews Grazer, whereas the NetNews Grazer Prefs enable you to set various preferences, and Read Interesting News provides a newsreading interface patterned after InterNews. It gets the articles that match your search string. NetNews Grazer can also send you email whenever new articles arrive, although that seems a little excessive to me. Perhaps the main problem with NewsGrazer is its set of requirements -- it needs System 7 or later, AppleScript 1.1, FaceSpan 1.0, MacTCP, and the TCP/IP and AppleScript 1.1 Scripting Additions. Just making sure you have everything available is too much work for many people. John thought of that, and a $20 shareware payment gets you an electronic manual along with AppleScript 1.1 and FaceSpan 1.0, as well as the TCP/IP and AppleScript 1.1 Scripting Additions.

Darrell Turner designed his $5 shareware NNTP Sucker program to be almost exactly like MacSlurp, in that it reads a Group file to see which groups you want to download, and then it goes out and downloads messages from those groups. You can't specify which messages to get, but you can set a maximum percent or number of messages to retrieve. When NNTP Sucker is done, it can quit, restart the Mac, or shut down the Mac. Like MacSlurp, NNTP Sucker creates output files for use with ToadNews and then rnMac. NNTP Sucker also works with a BBS program Darrell's working on called Pancake. Finally, I've heard rumors that a new version of NNTP Sucker might come out that can work with Easy View, an excellent text browser that's much easier to set up than ToadNews and rnMac.

Bill Cramer's $25 shareware newsreader, TheNews, works by default in MacTCP mode, although it also works with UUCP connections and with Unix shell accounts. TheNews is a fairly basic newsreader, with support for threads and the capability of using Eudora to email responses and forwarded messages. Unfortunately, I always seem to have various problems with TheNews whenever I try to test it, and its interface simply doesn't compare to the main freeware and shareware newsreaders. Feel free to try it out, but I suspect you'll prefer NewsWatcher, Nuntius, or InterNews.

Since John Norstad makes the code for NewsWatcher available for anyone who wants it, there have been various modified versions of NewsWatcher in the past. One current and popular modification on the standard NewsWatcher program comes from David Brewster and Bob Boonstra. VA-NewsWatcher adds support for posting binary files, rudimentary article filtering, and article sorting. The last two of these features are likely to be useful to many people, so I recommend you check out VA-NewsWatcher. Do make sure you have the latest version and that it's in synch with John's official version, if possible, to avoid missing out on any new features or bug fixes in the base code.

I hope this chapter has given you a sense of how varied newsreaders can be, and how no one can really decide for you which you'll like the best. I personally prefer NewsHopper and NewsWatcher, but many people like Nuntius, and InterNews has a following as well. Any one of them should perform admirably for you, and if the one you try doesn't work well, just switch to another.

Next, let's look at FTP programs like Anarchie and Fetch.