• rudimentary support for MIME quoted-printable encoded messages. Incoming mail messages and news articles with a "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable" header are recognized and displayed correctly. However, the charset information is still ignored, MacSOUP always assumes ISO-Latin-1 (which is almost always the correct guess though). Parts of a "multipart/mixed" content-type that are QP-encoded are not recognized by this version. And outgoing messages can't be sent as quoted-printable yet. Didn't I say "rudimentary?" So there. :-)
(Full MIME support is planned for some future version. That's a looong way to go, so don't expect it any time soon.)
• one thing that was already changed in the last version, but which I forgot to mention: the "live" window dragging feature is gone (several people objected to it). If you want it back, install the "DragWindow II" system extension.
Bug fixes:
• the 1.0d5 version had a major bug that caused it to crash on Macs without Color QuickDraw. Fixed.
• several other minor bugs fixed (most of them only cosmetic)
For those who have missed the d5 version, here are the changes from d4 again.
Changes since version 1.0d4
Most important change: my email address is now <stk@berlin.snafu.de>.
Enhancements:
• touched up the overall appearance of windows. The graphical thread display has changed too, and the meaning of some of the symbols. The currently displayed article is now a circle filled with a black dot (that’s what unread articles looked like in the previous version); unread articles have a small cross in the middle. If you are used to the previous display, this may be a bit confusing at first, but it has the advantage that the color and b&w versions are now the same. Plus, it just looks better...
• pressing return in the subject window moves the highlight bar to the next thread.
• when a mail message is displayed, left-arrow and right-arrow take you to the message that comes before or after this one in the subject window (depending on the sort order), no matter if it is selected for reading or not
• you can select different colors for normal text and quoted text. This is particularly useful when someone posts an article and doesn't leave blank lines between the quoted text and his own. Default is black for normal text and gray for quoted text.
• in the editor window you can now type option-space to produce a non-breaking space, like in most word processors. Useful to prevent MacSOUP from breaking a line in the middle of “4:00 am” or something.
• a “Rot-13” command in the Edit menu
• a new option to automatically close the log window after unbatching is finished
• an option to expire only those groups for which the imported packet contains articles. Useful if you sometimes import packets that contain only mail.
• all windows can be zoomed (at last)
• new enhanced scroll bars. One of the very few things that Apple's user interface designers didn't get right is scroll bars, because they don't show you how much of the document is visible in the window. Suppose you look at a window that shows 20 lines of text, and the scroll box is at the very top of the scroll bar. Now, has the whole text 21 lines, or 20000? - Many other operating systems (even Atari’s, yuck) have variable-size scroll boxes, where the size of the scroll box indicates the ratio of visible text to total text. I have now implemented such scroll bars in MacSOUP too; if you like the standard ones better, you can turn it off in the preferences dialog. And before you ask: no, it’s not possible to write a system extension that does this in all programs. I would have already written it...
• when saving messages to disk, the subject of the message is suggested as a file name (truncated if necessary). Also, MacSOUP remembers the directory where you last saved something, and opens to that location again next time (even if you quit the program in between).
• changed the style of attribution lines (for followups and email replies). For public followups, it now looks like this: “Stefan Kurth <stk@berlin.snafu.de> wrote:” (the folks on news.software.readers seem to agree that including the message ID isn't a Good Thing.) Email replies don't have an attribution line at all any more.
• some of the keys on the extended keyboard now work (page up/down, home, and end). Forward delete does not work yet.
Bug fixes:
• previously, when the database was corrupted for a group, MacSOUP would get confused, display unexpected error alerts, or crash. Now MacSOUP detects a corrupted database, and rethreads the group if necessary.
• when you attempted to start MacSOUP and some of the unsent outgoing messages were corrupt (like due of a crash or something), MacSOUP would display an “unexpected -192 error” alert and refuse to start. Now, it deletes the corrupt messages and tells you so.
• MacSOUP used to hang when you tried to bring an open editor window to the front by double-clicking in the "Outgoing News & Mail" window, or when you tried to quit MacSOUP while there are open editor windows. This happened only in 24-bit mode, and is fixed.
• MacSOUP used to drop into the debugger (or crash with a type 12 error) when an article has more than one instance of the same header line, e.g. two References lines. Fixed.
• when you made more than one reply packet in the same session (i.e. without quitting the program in between), you would sometimes get an unexpected -39 error, a corrupt reply packet, or all sorts of nasty crashes. Fixed.
• deleting mail messages didn't always work. I mean, it did work, but MacSOUP would sometimes become confused soon afterwards. Fixed.
• double-clicking in the newsgroups window now finally works all the time (phew…)
• several other bugs that I can't remember any more.
