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YA-NW Readme
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1995-07-09
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YA-NW Readme
Yet Another NewsWatcher with binary and anonymous remailer posting,
article filtering (kill files), and article sorting
Fat binary version. Please see PROGRAM INFORMATION below for
who to blame for what.
IMPORTANT:
There have been some reports of people having trouble using YA-NW
(bombs at startup, random bombs when reading or posting, out of
memory alerts when opening group windows with as few as 40 articles).
I have tried very hard to reproduce and then solve these problems.
Some problem areas to look out for:
1) Make sure you have your location specified correctly in the Map
and Date & Time control panels.
2) Set a reasonable maximum number of articles to fetch, such as 600,
rather than the standard default value of 15000.
3) Make sure you're using the most recent version of macTCP (2.0.6),
and have installed all the appropriate system software updates (7.5.1
for example).
4) If these fail, see if disabling filtering has any effect.
5) As a last resort, trash your old prefs and/or filter files, and see
if that makes any difference. YA-NW should be able to read and
translate old version files without problem, but this has helped some
people.
REVISION HISTORY:
2.0b27.5
- Fixed a problem with the acur resource not being preloaded and
nonpurgeable, which caused crashes on some machines.
- Added detection of Base64 encoded binary files, and decoding via a new
helper application "Yet Another Base64 Decoder." Unlike MPack, this new
decoder will handle (indeed it requires) the concatenation of all parts
of the original message, and it will run in the background without user
interaction after being sent an apple event.
- Relabeled some preferences for greater clarity.
- Changed the default sort order for dates, markers, and scores. Now
normal order is new, marked, and high first, respectively.
- Fixed a problem with subject window in which threads were not kept
together and expanded/collapsed properly if the collapse threads option
was off or the expand hilighted option was on.
- Fixed a problem with marker characters with ASCII codes above 127 not
being drawn in subject windows.
_ The asterisk character drawn in subject windows when a collapsed thread
contains a marked article is now drwan in the default hilight color.
- Improved saved message file compatibility with the other versions of
NewsWatcher. If you open a message file saved with one of the other
versions, you'll get an alert telling you that some of the settings
may have been changed.
2.0b27.4
- Fixed testing of clicks in subject window labels to only register
a click within the actual label text (and not the full width of the
column). Also added hilighting of clicked labels and test to see if
the mouse button was released within the label text.
- Fixed a problem for with the "you can't sort by author/date" alerts.
- Removed no longer used "sort recent to top" and "sort hilighted to
top" options which are superceded by full date and hilight color
sorting.
- Added filtering by lines, newsgroups, and path headers.
- Added sorting by line count.
- Added new preference for sorting in descending order. For sorting by
date, this means threads with newer articles are at the top of the
window. For sorting by subject or author, the z's are at the top and
numbers at the bottom. Reverse sorting can be changed on a window
by window basis by using the "Sort in Descending Order" menu item
in the hierarchical Sorting menu. When subject window labels are
shown, there is a '+' or '-' character at the far left of the label
area, indicating if sorting is currently in ascending or descending
order. Clicking on the character toggles the sort order.
- Moved the sorting options to the subject window options dialog.
- Filter hilight colors are now fully editable. You can choose as many
different colors as you wish. The default hilight color can be set in
the Filter preferences dialog, and individual filter hilight colors
can be edited in the Filters preferences dialog. Because of this
change, when sorting by hilight color you are sorting first by hue,
then by lightness.
- Because of the change in how filter hilight colors are handled, the
filter file format has been changed. When you first run the new
version of YA-NW with an old killfile, you'll get a prompt warning you
of the file format change. The old killfile will be saved, so that
you can revert to using an older version of YA-NW or VA-NW. (You
will have to change the type of the saved file from 'KILB' to 'KILL'.)
- GLOBAL KILLFILES!!!!! Holding down the option key when clicking on the
Edit menu changes "Edit Group Filter…", "Filter this Author…" and
"Filter this Subject…" to "Edit Global Group Filter…", "Globally
Filter this Author…" and "Globally Filter this Subject…". These
commands are used to edit a set of special global filters that are
applied to all newsgroups (after an local filters have been applied).
The global and local killfiles are applied in that order. Processing
of matches within a killfile is also sequential according to the
position of the filter in the group's filter list. This means two
things:
1) the FIRST matching "kill" filter wins, eliminating the
article from being displayed.
2) the LAST matching hilight filter wins, setting the hilight
color for the article.
The local killfile is processed last so that its hilighting will win
out over any performed by the global killfile.
- added "nn killed" to the status panel in subject windows.
- modified the format of anonymous remailer messages sent using
Cypherpunk remailers to place the Anon-To or Anon-Post-To header at the
beginning of the body text using the special :: line in order to work
around a bug in the remailer software. The headers were further
modified to ensure that the References header line is also contained in
the anonymous post or email message as appropriate. See the file
"Anonymity and YA-NewsWatcher" for more information on what is and is
not included in anonymous messages.
- You can now assign weighting factors to filters. As an article is
filtered, a running sum of the weighting factors for all matching
filters is kept as a score for the article. It is then possible to sort
by score or kill based on score (for example, all articles with a score
of less than 0). There are new preferences in the Subject Options
preferences dialog to enable or disable showing the score in subject
windows (showing will probably be off in everyday use, but turning it
on may be helpful in debugging filters) and in the Filter Otions
preferences dialog (where the threshold for killing based on score is
set). There is also a new Sorting menu item to permit sorting by score.
2.0b27.3
- Marker character in subject windows is now drawn in bold.
- Various remaining conversion errors fixed.
- Fixed the problem of anonymous posts having no subject lines
- Fixed a problem with date displays in article windows.
- Default anonymous remailer addresses changed from the obsolete
usura@replay.com to remailer@replay.com
- Updated anonymous remailer help and information files
- Fixed a problem with the Balloon help strings for the post selected
parts dialog.
- Clicking on the marker, subject, author, or date labels in subject
windows changes the sorting to by subject or by author (and the label
is underlined to indicate the sorting mode). Shift clicking the
currently underlined marker switches sorting to by article number (and
no labels are underlined).
- Added sorting of subject windows by date and marker hilight color.
Also removed the "author threads" sorting option.
- Added a new "Subject Window Options" pane to the preferences dialog,
which contains most of the preferences that affect subject windows.
- Added a preference to disable by default the display of column labels
in subject windows.
- Labels in subject windows can be enabled or disabled on the fly using
the "Show Labels/Hide Labels" item in the Edit menu.
2.0b27.2
- Fixed various conversion errors that occured in VA-NW 27.0 (missing
prefs dialog items, misformatted message window controls, missing
balloon help, etc.)
- Added an option to use a marker character to mark hilighted articles
in subject windows (in addition to being able to choose a hilight
color).
- Added column labels in subject windows, and changed the order of the
columns.
- Added a preference item to enable or disable the displaying of times
in subject windows, and changed the functioning of the similar dates
preference to enable or disable only the date display independent of
the time.
- Added the ability to post a selected range of parts of an attached
binary file, to deal with the problem of having to repost all the parts
if one or more parts are damaged or incomplete. If the option key is
held down when clicking on the Send button (or choosing Send from the
menu), a dialog appears in which the range of parts to be sent can be
entered.
- Added support for using anonymous remailers for email or usenet
messages. (See the file Anonymity and YA-NewsWatcher for more
information on this.)
- Fixed a problem with creating killfiles. Formerly, if no valid
killfile was found on startup, a new killfile was created in the
Preferences folder in the System folder. Now it is created in the same
folder as the current YA-NW preferences file.
- Increased the number of available filtering hilight colors to 24.
(Thanks to Bob Boonstra and his daughter for the colors).
PROGRAM INFORMATION:
This is a *beta* version of Yet Another NewsWatcher, not the final
*production* version 2.0. You are certainly welcome to try this beta
version, and use it if you like it, but you should be aware that it is
not yet finished, polished, or error-free.
Yet Another NewsWatcher is free. It may not be sold for profit or
included with software or other products which are sold for profit
without the permission of Northwestern University, but otherwise you
should feel free to use it and redistribute it.
Yet Another NewsWatcher is being developed by Brian Clark, based on the
original NewsWatcher application by John Norstad and Value-Added
NewsWatcher by Brian Clark, David Brewster and Bob Boonstra. Please
report any problems you find to the author, but PLEASE read the
NewsWatcher manual and the Yet Another NewsWatcher readme files FIRST.
mailto:baclark@wwa.com
Updated versions of Yet Another NewsWatcher are regularly sent to
MacGifts for redistribution to the major Mac anonymous ftp sites
(Sumex, UMich et al.)
The anonymous FTP sites for the Value-Added NewsWatcher program and the
CodeWarrior C source code are:
ftp://grocne.enc.org/pub/V.A.NewsWatcher/
ftp://ftp.ultranet.com/pub/boonstra/V.A.NewsWatcher/
The anonymous FTP site for the original NewsWatcher program, the user
document, and the CodeWarrior C source code is:
ftp://ftp.acns.nwu.edu/pub/newswatcher/
The helper programs used by NewsWatcher (all 3 versions) are available
via anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.acns.nwu.edu/pub/newswatcher/helpers/
NewsWatcher (all 3 versions) requires a Macintosh running System 7.0 or
later with 2.5 megabytes or more of memory and a hard drive. The Mac
must be connected to the Internet, and MacTCP or Open Transport must be
properly installed and configured.
(Open Transport is Apple’s new networking architecture for the Mac. It
is currently in beta test. Apple has not yet released it to the public.
If you have a beta version of Open Transport installed, NewsWatcher
uses it. Otherwise, NewsWatcher uses MacTCP. This Open Transport
support is preliminary and experimental. We have tested it with version
1.0f3 of Open Transport. It has not, however, been widely tested yet,
and it hasn’t been tested with any other versions of Open Transport.)
NewsWatcher (all 3 versions) is distributed as a “fat binary”. This
means that it runs in native 68K mode on Motorola 68K Macintoshes, and
it runs in native PowerPC mode on Power Macintoshes.
For dialup use, NewsWatcher (all 3 versions) works with the various
SLIP and PPP programs, and with ARA together with an appropriately
configured AppleTalk/IP gateway. It is strictly an online newsreader,
and it does not support any other kind of dialup connection. The
program requires an active full TCP/IP connection to the Internet. It
does not support offline newsreading, and it does not support older
kinds of dialup connections designed primarily for simple terminal
emulation. We have no plans to add these features soon, if at all. If
you need an offline newsreader or a newsreader which works with older
kinds of dialup connections, you must use some other program.
The original NewsWatcher was written by John Norstad of Northwestern
University:
mailto:j-norstad@nwu.edu
The program is based on the original version 1.0.2 written by Steve
Falkenburg of Apple Computer. John Werner of Taligent is a major
contributor. Thanks also to the following people who helped test
development and beta versions, helped with design discussions, and/or
helped with code contributions: Apple DTS, Steven Carmody, Steve
Dorner, Adam Engst, Ron Flax, Aaron Giles, Haydn Huntley, Steve
Klingsporn, Jean-Pierre Kuypers, Robert Lentz, Peter Lewis, Jim
Matthews, Andrea Norstad, Jeremy Norstad, Lasse Hillerøe Petersen,
André Pirard, Quinn, Howard Rafal, Pete Resnick, Craig Richmond, Larry
Rosenstein, Leonard Rosenthol, Jeroen Scheerder, Michael Shappe, Eric
Slosser, Stephan Somogyi, Neal Trautman, Dean Yu, Mahboud Zabetian,
Willem Nijenhuis, and the nice people on comp.sys.mac.comm.
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, BRIAN CLARK, DAVID BREWSTER, and BOB BOONSTRA
PROVIDE VALUE-ADDED NEWSWATCHER AS IS, WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OR PROMISE
OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT. NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, BRIAN CLARK, DAVID
BREWSTER, and BOB BOONSTRA DISCLAIM ANY LIABILITY OF ANY KIND FOR ANY
DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM THE USE OF VALUE-ADDED NEWSWATCHER,
INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, INDIRECT OR
SPECIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, EVEN IF NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, OR BRIAN
CLARK, OR DAVID BREWSTER, OR BOB BOONSTRA ARE AWARE OF THE POSSIBILITY
OF SUCH DAMAGES. NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, BRIAN CLARK, DAVID BREWSTER,
and BOB BOONSTRA MAKE NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, WITH RESPECT
TO THE PROGRAM, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Popup CDEF © Copyright 1994 Ari Halberstadt.
Portions Copyright © 1993 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Portions Copyright © 1994, 1995 Northwestern University.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
1) MOST IMPORTANT. This version is NOT an "official, John Norstad"
version of NewsWatcher. John can't and won't support it, and is not
responsible for any bugs I've added to his code. I will attempt to
continue to support Yet Another NewsWatcher, and keep pace with the
modifications John Norstad makes to his version. John's own binary
posting and killfile support will not be available until version 2.1.
Since no one can say when this will be available, I have decided to
release my own version, now. It is also NOT supported or endorsed in
any manner by Northwestern University or ACNS. All questions or
comments regarding problems or support should be directed towards me
and NOT John Norstad or Northwestern University or ACNS.
2) John has worked very long and hard to make NewsWatcher a powerful,
reliable, and easy to use newsreader. He has also been very generous in
making the source code to his version freely available for
non-commercial use. Because of this, it's relatively easy to add
features to NewsWatcher and have the result work well: John has already
done most of the work, and his code is easy to work with. The
restrictions imposed by John Norstad and Northwestern University
regarding the use, distribution, and modification of NewsWatcher also
apply to YA-NewsWatcher.
3) Apart from binary posting, I've made some other small changes to my
version. The spinning beach ball cursor has been replaced with a color
animated cursor (the small NewsWatcher newspaper icon, with a spinning
globe). The dialog to select folders has been changed to satisfy the
Apple Human Interface Guidelines, and it's now smarter about aliases to
volumes. The subject line to file name routine has been changed to be
more intelligent and to provide less mangled file names when saving
articles to disk.
4) Obviously the first big change is binary posting. A file icon button
is added to message windows, to the right of the "send to self" button.
Clicking on it elicits a file dialog, where a single file to attach to
your post may be chosen. Clicking on the Send button causes the
selected file to be (optionally) uuencoded, split into several
sections, and sent. The keyboard shortcut for clicking on the file icon
is Command-4 (just as Command-1,2,3 are shortcuts for the other three
icon buttons). If the option key is held down when clicking on Send,
etc. a dialog appears allowing just a range of sections to be sent.
This is useful when reposting, as only the bad sections need to be
re-sent (assuming that the encoding kind and section size are not
changed).
There are four new preference items, under "Message Files" (which was
formerly named "Saving Messages" in John's version). "News part size in
kB" lets you set the approximate size in kB of each section of the file
being posted. "Mail part size in kB" does the same for files being
emailed. Values of about 32 to 64 are reasonable. The actual number of
bytes in the section will be somewhat greater, since this number does
not include the header lines or any of the additional lines required to
mark the start and end of segments, the encoding method, etc. Please
also note that temporary system memory is used when posting files. The
amount of memory required is somewhat greater than the value entered in
the two "part size in kB" boxes. Using temporary memory means that you
do not have to increase the memory partition of Yet Another NewsWatcher
in order to send large files. In fact, since increasing the memory
partition reduces the amount of memory available to the system and
other applications, it reduces the amount of temporary memory available
for sending attached files.
The two other popup menus, labelled "News encoding:" and "Mail
encoding:" permit you to specify how the attached file will be encoded
before posting. These popup menus also appear in the options panel in
message windows (visable when "Show Details" is enabled), allowing the
default value to be overridden for a particular post. The available
options are uuencoding (the standard internet encoding method),
binhexing (appropriate for Macintosh files) and none (for plain text
files).
Generally uuencoding should be used for binary posts to non-Macintosh
binary newsgroups, and for binary email to non-Macintosh users. BinHex
encoding may be used to email a Mac file to another Mac-using friend,
or to post a Mac file to a Mac-only binary newsgroup.No encoding should
be used to post or email long pure-text files.
The wrap checkbox in the control panel affects how unencoded binary
posts are handled. If it's checked, then the file's text will be
wrapped to 80 columns. If it's not, the file's text will still be
wrapped to 1000 columns (which was chosen because that's the guaranteed
lower limit for maximum line lengths for mail servers).
The name of the file, and the part number, will be prepended to
whatever subject line you entered in the message window. For example:
Subject: My test post
would become when sent:
Subject: Jupiter.gif [0/1] My test post
etc. if you were posting a file named Jupiter.gif. The text entered in
the body of the message window becomes the descriptive information
supplied in part 0 of the binary post.
5) The second big change is article filtering (kill files). David
Brewster added the original version of this feature in Value-Added
NewsWatcher, based on some older code by John Werner of Taligent. There
are new preferences items under "Filter and Sorting Options". "Disable
filtering" turns the filter option off, so that all groups read after
this is disable will not have articles "killed" from them. "Show
filtered articles" is intended to let you still see killed articles in
message windows (where they will be marked as read), but this is
disabled at present due to some lingering bugs. "Expand threads that
contain hilighted articles" is pretty much self explainitory, it
expands a thread that contains an article that matches either a keep or
hilight filter.
There are three new Edit menu items. "Edit Group Filter" brings up a
moveable modal dialog showing the filter criteria for the selected or
viewed group, permitting you to edit or delete existing filters, or add
new ones. "Filter this Author" lets you add a filter to the current
group for the author whose article is currently selected. "Filter this
Subject" lets you add a filter to the current group for the subject of
the currently selected article.
There are two radio buttons in the Group Filter dialog which determine
which articles are killed. If "Kept" is selected, then all articles not
matching any kill filters are shown, and the ones marked for
hilighting are so displayed. If "Deleted" is selected, only articles
matching the various hilight/keep filters will be displayed. All
other articles are killed. Use this option when you only want to see a
few specific articles within a newsgroup.
When editing a filter, via clicking on the filter in the group filter
dialog box, or via a "Filter this Subject" or "Filter this Auther" menu
commands; you are presented with edit filter dialog. The dialog is
intended to be read from top to bottom left to right as an English
sentence.
The kill/keep/hilight popup is used to select the filtering method.
Kill will delete matching articles from the header list. Keep or
hilight are pretty much the same, and will probably be combined in a
future release. they mark the article as hilighted and allow you to
set the hilight color via the "Hilight Color" popup. A keep always
overrides a kill. The second popup allows you to set the header this
filter applies to. The third popup allows you to set the filter type.
Currently many filter types are supported, including regular
expression! I am using Extend Regular Expression syntax for the
regular expression filtering. I will include docs on ERE filtering in
a future release, so for now you're on your own. Ignore case decides
whether this filter is case sensitive(off) or case insensitive(on).
A filter is applied to a group when it is opened from the group window.
Filters apply to both full group lists and user group lists.
6) Other additions include article sorting in subject windows and digest
scrolling. Bob Boonstra added the original version of these features in
Yet Another NewsWatcher.
Subject windows can be sorted in a number of ways: Article Number,
Subject, Author, Date, Marker, Line Count, and Score. Sorting by
Article Number is the default sort order in John Norstad's version.
Threads are sorted based on the article number of the first article in
the thread. Sorting by Subject does just that, threads are sorted by
the canonical subject of the thread (ignoring RE:, etc.). Sorting by
Author orders the threads by the name of the author with the first
article in the thread.
Sorting is accomplished by selecting one of the the options using a
hierarchical Sorting menu item under the News menu, or by clicking on
the appropriate column label in the Subject window (when labels are
shown). Changing the sort order when a Subject window is frontmost will
resort the articles in that Subject window. Any new Subject windows use
the default sort method chosen in the "Filter and Sorting Options"
preferences dialog.
Some simple digest processing was also added by Bob Boonstra in Yet
Another NewsWatcher. When reading an article, the 'b' key now scrolls
to the first line beginning with "Subject: " following the current
insertion point. If the "Spacebar digest shortcut" item in the
Newsreading Options preference dialog is checked, digest processing is
also mapped to the space bar. For both keys, the default space bar
processing occurs if no "Subject: " lines are found. (Note that digest
processing requires that the Main Keyboard Shortcuts" preference be
selected.)
7) Anonymous remailer options. Please read the document "Anonymity and
YA-NewsWatcher" for information on this subject.
*-*-*-*
Limitations of and simplifications in this release.
Filtering is still rudimentary. A much more elaborate and easy to
configure filtering scheme is planned for the future. Among other
problems, you can't use any of the Edit menu filtering commands from
within a referenced article window (an article that was opened by
command-clicking on a reference ID).
*-*-*-*
Special thanks to John Norstad, David Brewster, and Bob Boonstra for
making possible NewsWatcher in all its variations.
Brian Clark
baclark@wwa.com