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YA-NW Revision History
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1996-06-23
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YA-NW Revision History
This is a list of some but not all of the changes that have in going from one version of YA-NewsWatcher to the next.
2.2.0b13
• Added the "Article Format" command to change the font or charset for
an open article window.
• Added the ability to auto-detect the appropriate charset for articles
(and the option to turn it off, since supposedly many newsreaders
create MIME headers that list the wrong charset).
• It's now possible to create a new filter for an article window opened
by reference, and you can display the Group Filters dialog then too.
• Made some changes to how reference threading is done to make it a bit
smarter.
• Fixed the erroneous -39 error report when trying to read filters from
an empty filters file. Also added more informative error dialogs when
problems occur reading or writing filters or newsgroup settings.
• Fixed some problems with saving newsgroup preferences when closing
subject windows. In addition, saving is now done only when the
settings have changed, and not every time a subject window is closed.
• Fixed the problem of articles saved to disk from subject windows not
having the correct character transliteration performed.
• Fixed a problem of certain operations failing or not running to
completion (such as not being able to check for new articles) when the
operation required the automatic closing of windows.
• Fixed a problem with "contains the word" filters acting as if they
were "contains the string."
• Fixed a problem with crashes when opening older version message files.
The crash would occur after the "Some settings may be changed" warning
alert was displayed.
• Fixed a problem with too-many menu items being disabled when a
non-floating status window was top-most or the only open window.
• Fixed a problem in the Newsgroup Settings dialog with the "Show
Scores" and "Show Labels" settings getting confused.
• Fixed an old thread sorting problem that may have sometimes caused
threads to be mis-sorted.
2.2.0b12
• Enable the text translation menus in the Message Options and Newsgroup
Options dialogs. It's now possible to specify other than Mac->Latin1
and Latin1->Mac character transliterations when sending messages or
viewing posts. When sending a non-binary message, YA-NewsWatcher now
includes the appropriate MIME headers indicating the character set in
use. For more information of this feature, see the document
"YA-NW and Character Sets."
• Added Transliteration Options to the preferences dialog to set the
default character set translations used for articles and messages.
2.2.0b11 (not publicly released)
• Added two new preferences in the Subject Windows Options portion of
the preferences dialog that deal with how articles are threaded.
First, a simple form of reference threading is now possible. See
the document “YA-NW and Sorting/Threading” for more information.
Second, it's now possible to specify whether followups to binary
posts will be placed in a separate thread (this used to be the
default, but this feature has been broken in original NewsWatcher
and its offshoots starting with version 2.1).
• Added the Message Filter Options dialog when clicking on the filter
icon in message windows. It's now possible to specify the label,
weight, and expiration times of filters that are automatically
created for your own posts. Also, rather than creating a single
global filter, a separate filter is created for each newsgroup to
which the message is posted.
2.2.0b10 (unofficial release)
• Synched with John Norstad's 2.1.3.
• Rearranged a number of menu items to be more consistent.
• Added support for using a Eudora Nicknames file. There's now a new
panel in the preferences dialog. From there you can specify a Eudora
Nicknames file that will be automatically converted and saved to a
new file, called YA-NewsWatcher Nicknames, stored in the
YA-NewsWatcher Settings folder, when the program starts up. These
nicknames are then available in a new “Insert Recipient” hierarchical
menu in the Edit menu. Note that, at present, when you select a
nickname from the “Insert Recipient” menu, the actual email address
and not the nickname is inserted. This is unlike Eudora, which inserts
the nickname and only later changes it to an email address.
• Redesigned and simplified a number of windows. The icon buttons are no
longer used in group and subject windows (and, like original
NewsWatcher, are always shown in message windows). A number of message
controls that were formerly visible when "Show Details" was enabled
are now set via a settings dialog (whose icon button is now enabled
and functional). The attach file button now leads to a dialog in which
the file to be attached can be set, along with the encoding methods
and segment size.
• The print dialog now has an extra button allowing the printing font
to be changed for the document being printed.
• Added a “Newsgroup Settings" menu item. This leads to a two level
dialog that allows certain preferences (subject window font, article
font, sort order, headers to display, etc.) to be set on a newsgroup
by newsgroup basis. These settings override those in the preferences
dialog.
• Separate filter files for each user group window are no longer
supported. To have filters that act only upon a specific user group
window, create a filter group with the same name as the user group
window, except preceded by a period (see the document “YA-NewsWatcher
and Filtering” for more information).
2.2.0b8 (not publicly released)
• Fixed a bug that caused the Get Newsgroup Description to not work with
subject windows opened from the full group list.
• Fixed some cosmetic bugs in drawing some types of text windows.
• Added 3 custom apple events. See the file "YA-NW and AppleScript" to
see how to use this new feature to add PGP support to YA-NW.
• Recent versions of YA-NW could not run on Macs that lack Color
QuickDraw (i.e. old Macs without a 68020 or better CPU). An alert was
displayed when trying to run the program on such machines. I believe
(but do not guarantee) that YA-NW will again run on non-Color
QuickDraw machines, so the alert and forced quit have been removed.
2.2.0b7
• Fixed a bug introduced in 2.2.0b6 of line count and date filters not
working when either the XOVER option is enabled, or the corresponding
header is shown in the subject window being filtered. These filters
now work as intended, and unlike earlier versions of YA-NW, the Date
and Lines headers are not fetched a second time for filtering if
they've already been obtained for display in subject windows (or if
XOVER is in use). Also fixed a problem with enabling and disabling the
OK button when editing a date and line filter.
• When the XOVER news server option is enabled, it's now possible to
sort subject windows by author and date and line count, even if
authors or dates or line counts are not displayed. (Previously the
test to disable sorting by line count when line counts weren't
available was missing).
• The recommended uudecoder for YA-NewsWatcher is now YA-Base64 1.2.1
(or later). This seems to be as reliable as uuUndo at decoding the
sometimes wierd uuencoded posts that show up. Unlike uuUndo, it will
also decode multiple attachments per file, and can be set to try
recursive decoding in case an attachment was encoded multiple times
with either uuencoding or Base64 encoding.
2.2.0b6
• Synched with John Norstad's 2.1.2.
• Fixed a bug when removing filters from the group list dialog, as well
as some other related filter editing problems.
• Added the option to fetch headers using the XOVER command.
• Changed how the Message-ID and Path: headers are formatted. As a side
result, posting on some systems may now be faster. It is no longer
possible to modify the Path: header by editing the resource STR# 128
number 272.
• Added support for a second kind of global filter to permit the
benefits of user group fie specific filters without having to use
separate filter files.
• Added support for option-clicking to create a filter that defaults to
filtering by author rather than by subject.
• Added support for auto-launching and quitting the binary decoder
helper apps.
• Added a preference to keep rather than delete "bad" binary
attachments.
• Added the option to create article sections on MIME type boundaries,
to keep CyberDog droppings out of sight.
• Replaced the "+" and "-" characters used to indicate sorting order in
the label region of subject windows with standard "stacked box" icons.
• Finally (fingers crossed) fixed the long headers fetching problem the
correct way. The bug could cause crashes when doing searches with long
(over 255 characters) header lines.
• Fixed how the popup menus were handled in message windows to deal with
multiple open windows having different encoding methods selected.
• Added the "Get Newsgroup Descriptions" command to the Special menu.
2.2.0b4
• Fixed a problem with cycling windows when the full group list window
was hidden.
• Finally introduced the improved filter list editing dialog that
displays all the filters and allows copy, paste, etc.
2.1.8
• Solved a problem with filters using "word ends with," "phrase ends
with," etc.
• Changed how window cycling was done to work around a cosmetic bug in
the System's handling of windows that's been around since the Lisa!
• Fixed a problem with erroneous filter count information in the
filtering status window.
2.1.7
• Solved a problem with case-insensitive filtering not always finding
all matching articles.
• Fixed a problem with crashes that occured at the end of a binary
extraction when cross-posted articles were being marked as read.
2.1.6
• Complete rewrite of the filtering code. Non-regular expression
searches are now typically 3 times faster and use less memory. The new
regular expression code is NOT guaranteed to give the same results as
the previous version. Note in particular that case-insensitive regular
expression searches are not currently supported. Also, at long last,
there's documentation that describes the regular expression syntax
understood by this version of YA-NewsWatcher.
• The order in which filtering is done has also changed. Previously,
a given article was matched against all the filters in a given filter
group, then the next article was processed, etc. This has changed.
Now a given filter is matched against all the articles in the given
newsgroup, then the next filter is processed, etc. This affects the
status dialog displayed during filtering (it now reports the number
of filters processed rather than the number of articles).
• When filtering using scores, the score is applied for every filter
match, even if the filter is a (killed) or (unlabeled) one.
• Optimized sorting a bit to eliminate performing the same sorting
comparisons on the contents of a multi-article thread more than once.
• Simplified the digest processing feature a bit. It now just does
a Find command for the a line of text that begins with "Subject:". Any
existing search string is preserved. Also, digest searching using
the spacebar key no longer pauses at the end of the current section
for multi-section digests.
• Fixed a problem with marking cross-posted articles read when
extracting binaries.
2.1.5
• Added a dialog when there is a failure trying to automatically send a
group list to a remote host. You are given the option of ignoring the
failure (which allows the group window to be closed without sending
the group list to the remote host), or proceeding normally (which
means you get a second dialog explaining what error occurred, and the
group window is not closed). If you often experience network problems
when fetching or sending the group list, you probably should not have
these operations done automatically. But if you do keep this option
enabled, and you encounter errors sending the group list to the remote
host, you can now close the group list window without successfully
sending the to the remote host. If you haven't saved the group list
locally, you'll see the usual dialog asking if you want to save your
unsaved changes.
• Fixed the problem of various windows not being fully erased when they
should be.
2.1.4
• Changed the handling of the .newsrc file when the resulting group list
window is saved to disk. What used to happen is the .newsrc file would
be ftp'd back to your host system only if it had unsaved changes. Of
course, if you saved the group list on your Mac, and then made no
further changes, the .newsrc file was considered unchanged and was not
automatically ftp'd back to your host system when the group list
window was closed. You had to manually send the .newsrc back in this
situation. This behavior has been changed. What happens now is that
the .newsrc file will be ftp'd back if it has changed since it was
last ftp'd. In addition, if you also save the user group list on your
Mac, you will get the usual unsaved changes prompt even if the .newsrc
has been ftp'd to your host machine. In effect, the state of saved or
unsaved changes is handled separately for ftp'ing the .newsrc file and
the local user group list file.
• Fixed a possible problem when zooming a subject, group, or message
window after hiding or showing the icon buttons.
• Solved a problem with finding the YA-NewsWatcher Settings folder when
performing a fresh, "private" installation.
• Found and fixed yet another problem with very long headers that could
cause crashes when choosing "Filter this Subject" or "Filter this
Author" from a message window.
• Fixed the problem of cross-posted articles being marked as read when
they were selected for an "extract binaries" operation and no attached
binaries were found.
• Fixed the cosmetic problem of the cursor still changing to an I-bar
when article, message, and text windows had been rolled up using
WindowShade.
• Changed some window update code to remove some unneeded full window
erasing and redrawing.
• Fixed the problem of being unable to drag newsgroup names into most
text fields in message windows (such as the message body).
2.1.3
• Added an option to modified the behavior of the "Next Group" command
(and other commands that translate to this, such as pressing the enter
key. Previously, even if there were still unread articles in the group
(because there were more article that the number fetched from the news
server), the next newsgroup in the list would be opened. Now, when the
"Next Group Command Ignores Unread Articles" option in Newsreader
Options is not checked, this only happens if there are no unread
articles in the current group. If there are unread articles, a new
subject window for the current newsgroup is reopened with newly
fetched unread articles.
• Added the "Get FAQ for this Newsgroup" command to the Special menu
that may be used to get the FAQ for many newsgroups via the Ohio State
web server.
• Fixed a problem with message windows that were initially zoomed to a
width less than the minimum permissible width. This usually only
happened when using a fixed width message window font like Monaco.
• Fixed a problem with icon button text being incorrectly positioned and
erased in some cases (dependent on the window font in use).
• Solved another 68000 compatibility problem caused by a bug in the
Metrowerks linker.
• Found and fixed yet another problem with very long headers that could
cause crashes.
2.1.2
• Added an item to the Filters menu to remove marked as read messages
from subject windows without refiltering.
• Removed a delay loop from the Show/Hide Icon Buttons code for message
windows that was used for testing and never removed.
• Fixed some problems in resizing subject windows after a refilter
command.
• Solved a problem with default filters being saved under the name of a
group window rather than simply as YA-NewsWatcher Filters when the
default filters were created after starting the program. This could
also cause problems when the YA-NewsWatcher Filters with user group
windows rather than a user group specific filters file.
• Fixed a problem with lower priority filters not being overridden by
later, higher priority filters if the filter label order had been
changed.
• Added a warning alert and program restriction that good people should
never encounter.
• Synched with John Norstad's 2.1.1.
2.1.1
• Filters created from message windows to filter your own posts and
their followups are now added to all the open filters files, not just
the YA-NewsWatcher Filters program-wide filter collection.
• Fixed the problem of the bogus unexpected error -43 when there is no
pre-existing default YA-NewWatcher Filters file in the YA-NewsWatcher
Settings folder.
• Fixed a problem with browsing filters from full group or new group
windows.
• Fixed a problem with the Filter button not being properly hidden and
unhidden in message windows when toggling Show/HideIconButtons.
• Added a check for the type and creator of filter files.
2.1.0
• Synched with John Norstad's 2.1.0 final. Note that because of the way
John Norstad's replacement list manager works, it will often be
necessary for a window to be resized after a change to the window
font, or if an information or control panel (column labels in subject
windows, icon buttons in most windows) is added or removed. This means
the window will be resized even if its size has been locked with the
padlock icon.
• Improved marking as read of cross-posted articles. Formerly, only
articles that were opened had any cross-posts also marked as read.
Now this also occurs when an article is saved to a file (including
binary extraction) from a subject window.
• Filters are now once again saved (and optionally backed up) after
editing.
• Added a filter icon button to message windows. When checked, a global
filter will be created for the message you create. The filter is added
to the program-wide filter set (stored in the file YA-NewsWatcher
Filters). The filter is configured to use the topmost (highest
priority) label, filter on the Subject: header, and expire in 10 days.
These defaults should be editable in a future version. The default
label is not employed in case the user has set the default to
(killed).
• Fixed the problem of edits to filters being lost.
• Fixed a memory corruption problem that occured when all the articles
in a newsgroup were killed by filters.
• Previously undocumented. You can change the text in STR# 128 number
272 to modify what YA-NW puts at the end of the Path: header. The
default value is !user.
2.0.6b4
• Reintroduced a form of labeling for icon buttons. When "Show Icon
Labels"is enabled, and the mouse is over an icon button in a group,
subject, or message window, a prompt explaining the function of the
button is displayed in the area below the icon buttons.
• Added (still inactive) icon buttons to subject and group windows. Like
the inactive PGP button added to message windows in a previous
version, these buttons will become functional in due course. Note that
because the subject and group windows are now taller, the minimum
height for these windows is increased. It's possible that in opening
group or locked size subject windows that the window will be misdrawn
because it is not tall enough. Simply resizing the window will solve
the problem.
• Added the option to filter on the Xref header.
• Added the option to have a horizontal scroll bar in subject windows.
In previous versions, the width of the subject was truncated as needed
to fit all the displayed fields within the subject window. The
narrower the window was made, the more severely the subject was
truncated. There's now a new subject windows options preference to
instead use a horizontal scroll bar, and maintain the full subject
width (or at least the first 79 characters of the subject).
• Fixed crashes that occured when multiple message windows were open at
the same time.
• Fixed a missing CNTL problem in 2.0.6b3
2.0.5b3
• Modified the Article Filter dialog to change the various filter
editing controls based on the type of header being for the filter.
Previously, the Date and Lines headers were filtered like the rest,
using the various string matching options. To do anything useful
usually required a complicated regular expression that might or might
not do what was desired. Now date and lines filters are handled
differently. For dates you can choose to filter articles more than a
given number of days old, or less than a given number of days old.
YA-NW is smart enough to know that if you enter a number of 2 for
"less than," and 4 for "more than," that you want to filter articles
that are less than 2 OR more than 4 days old; while having the numbers
reversed means you want to filter articles that are less than 4 AND
more than two days old. Filtering on lines works in a similar manner.
With dates there is an option to filter or not filter articles with
missing or invalid date headers. For lines there is an option to
filter or not filter articles with missing or zero line counts.
Note that any old date or lines filters are made inoperative by this
change. It's up to the user to open the Group Filters dialog for the
various filter groups, find the old date and lines filters, and edit
them appropriately.
• Changed the interpretation of filter priority. Previously, the first
matching "kill" filter would kill an article, while the last matching
non-kill filter would provide the article's label (or hilight color in
previous versions). Starting with YA-NW 2.0.5, the rank of a label
(its order in the list of labels) is used to determine whether a later
filter will override a previous filter's labeling of an article.
The new rules are as follows:
1) A kill label always overrides any previous label. A kill label may
itself be overridden by any subsequent filter. Thus it is possible to
unkill an article with a later filter.
2) Non-kill labels will only override a previous label of equal or
lower rank.
• Because of the changes in how articles are killed and labeled, the
status dialog displayed when filtering articles no longer shows how
many articles have been killed. The subject window does still show
this information at the top, and now also shows the number of articles
labeled (which in this contect means given a label other than (killed)
or (unlabeled)).
2.0.4b6
• Replaced the fake icon buttons in message windows with true (icon
checkbox) controls. The regular checkboxes were also replaced with
3-D versions, and the entire panel area is now drawn in light grey.
• The panel areas in windows are no longer redrawn in white when the
window is moved to the background.
• Removed the hand cursor when dragging in subject windows.
• Added a test when emailing (only) an attached file for an empty
part 0 message. If the part 0 description is empty it is not sent.
You still need to supply a part 0 description for binary posts.
• If a filter group has no filters, filtering for that group is not
done. This solves the problem of empty filter groups with the
"Articles not matched are deleted" option set killing all messages.
• Changed how filters are handled. Previously, there was one set of
group filters that were applied to all newsgroups. Now filters are
associated with a user group file, and are saved in a new settings
file that is created in a new "YA-NewsWatcher Settings" folder (which
is created in the same folder as the active preferences file). This
means you can have different sets of global, regional, and local
filters defined for different sets of newsgroups. In the future, the
settings files will also be used to store usergroup and newsgroup
specific preferences.
• Changed filter "hilighting" again. Under the old system, filters were
set to either kill, keep, or hilight articles. An arbitrary single
marker character and arbitrary hilight color could be used to mark
articles in subject windows. All three of these functions have now
been combined into a Finder-like label function. Labels are chosen
from a popup menu in the Article Filter dialog. All filters will label
a matching article in some way. There are two special labels:
"(unlabeled)" which simply passes the article unmodified (as the keep
option did before), and "(killed)" which functions like the old kill
option. The remaining 32 labels are completely user configurable in
the preferences dialog. The color and label text can be edited, and
the 32 labels can be dragged to change their order.
• Owing to the above two changes in how filters are handled, the old
filter files will no longer work. The new version of Filter Converter
(1.0.2) can convert existing YA-NewsWatcher or VA-NewsWatcher filter
files to the new format.
• If "Show line counts" is enabled for Subject windows, when saving a
file (binary or otherwise) to disk, the NewsWatcher Status dialog will
show progress information (i.e. "Saving File 1 of 2 line 200 of 566").
• Changed the Attachment line in message windows to indicate the sizes
of the attached file's data and resource forks.
• Fixed a problem that erroneously caused all the articles in a group to
be marked as read. If the unread article count was greater than the
number of articles being fetched, and if all the articles fetched from
the server were killed, then the entire group would be marked as read.
• Changed status display during filtering to show as killed all articles
that are removed from a subject using the "Articles not matched are
deleted" filter group option.
• Fixed a problem with Bcc email recipients not being properly blinded
by all mail servers. To solve this problem, the Bcc header is now no
longer sent as part of the message (fix supplied by John Norstad).
• Fixed a problem with erroneously marking as read all messages in a
newsgroup. If there are initially more unread articles in the group
than are being fetched, and all the fetched articles are either killed
or not on the server, then all the unread articles were erroneously
marked as read (fix partially supplied by John Norstad).
• Fixed a problem in b5 with an incorrect CDEF. Also recompiled with the
latest bug fixes to the CW7 compiler.
2.0.3b0
• Resurrected the old "Sort Hilighted to Top" option and removed the
old "Sort by Hilight Color" sorting option. When "Sort Hilighted to
Top" is enabled, articles in subject windows are first sorted by
hilight color, and then by the regular sorting criterion (author,
subject, etc.) The reverse sort option does not affect sorting by
hilight color.
• As part of the above change, and to minimize future compatibility
problems, a number of preferences are now stored in a private YA-NW
resource and are no longer shared with VA-NW. The effect of this is
that several preferences will have to be re-entered. They are:
In "Newsreading Options" - "Spacebar Digest Shortcut"
In "Subject Windows" - "Initial Default Sort Mode"
In "Filter Options" - "Disable Filtering", "Show Killed Articles",
and "Expand Threads That Contain Hilighted Articles"
• Added balloon help for the labels in subject windows.
• Added the option to hide the status window (except at startup, since
the window is shown before the preferences are read). When the status
window is hidden, and there's therefore no cancel button to press, you
can still cancel a long process by pressing command-period.
• Changed the (optional) expired filters notification to display in the
status window, beep, and then pause 5 seconds rather than putting up
an alert.
• Solved a problem with changes in preferences not being properly
detected by the "intelligent" prefs saving feature.
• Fixed a bug that erroneously deleted the last item in the full group
list when other items were being deleted. There was a comparable bug
in the original NewsWatcher code that did the same thing when groups
were automatically deleted when they were no longer on the news
server. That's been fixed too.
• Fixed a bug in the LDEF and a few other places that caused crashes
when dealing with long subject lines, etc. The code foolishly assumed
that header text would be no longer than 255 characters, which is no
longer true.
• Changed for the second time how the test for the presence of the
original Color Picker is performed. The original method should have
worked, but failed on at least one user's PowerBook 100. The method
used in 2.0.2 used Gestalt, which unfortunately won't work if the new
Color Picker extension isn't installed, which means that people with
older System software are erroneously excluded from using the Color
Picker. So I'm back to a variant of the one used in 2.0.1. Someday
Apple will make stuff like this reasonably reliable and foolproof. Not
today however.
• Fixed the old cosmetic defect of Filters menu items being enabled when
a group or subject window is topmost and there's not exactly 1 item
selected. Also updated the balloon help for the menu appropriately.
2.0.2 Final
• Increased the maximum length of header that can be fetched from the
server from 255 to 4095 characters. This will help to alleviate a
problem some people have encountered when trying to filter using the
References: header (filtering failed when the long header was
truncated at 255 characters).
• Added the ability to filter on the NNTP-Posting-Host header. This
makes it easier to kill spammed or inappropriate commercial posts from
badly managed sites without having to download and deal with the much
longer Path: header.
• Modified filtering status code to be a bit more efficient and also to
give time to other applications more often.
• Prefs and filters file backup and saving is more intelligent. The
prefs file won't be saved (and optionally backed up) if nothing has
changed (for example, when you could not connect to the news server).
Because the article cache is kept in the prefs file, the save and
backup is usually done if you open any newsgroups. Similarly, the
filter file won't be saved (and optionally backed up) if the filters
are not edited or expired.
• Added the traditional hand cursor when dragging items in a list.
• Added the option to immediately quit if unable to connect to the news
server.
• Fixed the problem of the Shift and Option keys not being recognized
when sending a message.
• Fixed a memory problem when cancelling a post or email message with
an attached file. Also improved error handling when posting binaries.
• Fixed the detection of the availability of the Color Picker routines
by using Gestalt instead of MyTrapAvailable (which should have worked
but didn't).
• Changed sorting by hilight color for non-color Macs to simply test a
given hilight color against black. A future version of YA-NW may
enable true sorting by hilight color for all Macs, even those without
the Color Picker routines.
2.0.1 Final
• Fixed a number of schoolboy howlers:
1) Moved the misplaced line of code that "fixed" the handling of the
nested Article Filter dialog from within the Filter Groups dialog
when a new filter was being created and edited.
2) Corrected a typo that caused many multi-part plain text messages
to be misidentified as MIME Base64 attachments and therefore
wrongly truncated when displayed in an article window.
3) Corrected the erroneous double Latin-1 translation of filenames of
binary attachments in new messages, and added proper Latin-1
translation for all parts of non-encoded attached files.
• Did some more bomb-proofing of the Cleanup822Date function to
better prevent problems on machines that don't have their location
set correctly in the Map and Date & Time control panels. This may
solve some of the out of memory problems and crashes experienced by
a few people. Now, when show date and/or time are selected in prefs,
but the machine location has not been set, the date and time will
be displayed as ? in subject windows.
• Made a number of changes to the color related code to better deal with
old, non-ColorQuickdraw machines and multiple screen depth monitors.
• Fixed some spelling errors/typos in dialogs or help balloons.
2.0 Final
• Fixed problem with old scores and filter hilighting/marking not being
reset when refiltering an open window. Also fixed the related problem
of read articles not being removed when a subject window is refiltered
and the preference to remove read articles is selected.
• Fixed the old, old problem of the group filter moveable modal dialog
becoming erroneously non-modal after it had been used to open a
filter dialog.
• Remedied some of the other problems with the filter group dialog
relating to crashes when dragging or scrolling items in the list.
• Fixed the problem of filtering by additional header (References, etc.)
not working for global and regional filter groups.
• Added a work-around for the 16000 limit in the full group list.
Instead of truncating the list (both as displayed in the program and
saved on disk) to 16000 items, now the full newsgroup list is
maintained and you can see and subscribe to the first 16000 groups.
You can delete the groups that you don't want, creating slack at the
bottom of the list for the groups that could not be displayed
previously. When the full group list is rebuilt, the deleted groups
are added back in, and can then be left in the list or again deleted
to make room for any undisplayed groups at the end of the alphabet.
Note that if you've already run into the 16000 limit, you need to
rebuild your full group list to fetch the names of all the newsgroups,
since previous versions of NewsWatcher only saved the first 16000 to
your preferences file.
This method of dealing with long newsgroup lists is not an elegant
one. There are a number of better ways to deal with more than 16000
new groups. All would require significantly more changes to the
program. This solution, though not pretty, is available NOW and will
be useful to many people.
IMPORTANT: Because of the way the program checks for new newsgroups,
you can't delete any groups that have appeared in the last day or two
and have them stay deleted. The next time you check for new groups at
startup, they will be added back in. Just wait two days and then
delete any unwanted new groups. In the meantime, any older groups that
you delete will stay deleted until you rebuild the full group list.
This is a bit annoying, but it's part of a safety feature that
prevents new groups from being overlooked.
LATE BREAKING NEWS: John Norstad has announced that he has
reconsidered his earlier decision not to modify the original
NewsWatcher to handle larger group lists. He now plans to have a beta
version with support for larger group lists available sometime in late
September.
• Fixed another problem with the detection of MIME Base64 attachments.
• Fixed the bug that caused the Group Filter dialog to be presented when
"Regionally Filter This Author" was selected while an article window
was topmost instead of the correct Article Filter dialog.
• Spell checked this document. :-) Maybe one day it'll be proofread too!
2.0b30
• Changed method of backing up prefs and filters files, to work better
with launching utilities like QuicKeys that keep track of files. Also
added status dialogs during the backup operations.
• Made sure that the names of attached files are converted to the Latin1
character set before being added to the subject line or the begin line
of a uuencoded attachment.
• Added a status dialog when a subject window is being resorted or
refiltered.
• Changed the status dialog displayed when filtering is occurring to
show the number of filter groups being applied. Previously, the
"processed" number was incremented once per filter group, leading to
the number of articles processed being a multiple of the total number
articles in the subject window. Now this number repeatedly counts up
from 0 to the number of articles in the subject window for each filter
group, and is reset back to zero for the next filter group.
• Added a checkbox to Subject Window Options preferences dialog to have
read messages removed from subject windows when they are refiltered.
• Added an item to the Special menu to disable or re-enable the
truncation of messages that seem to be binary posts. Sometimes the
logic used to detect binary posts fails, causing normal text messages
to be truncated. This menu option lets you (presumably temporarily)
disable truncation so that the message can be read, or printed or ...
• Fixed detection of BinHex encoded binaries that was broken when Base64
detection was added.
• Reduced the time articles are kept in the cache from 60 to 30 days.
• Added the option to flush (empty) the article cache when quitting by
holding down the option key when selecting Quit. There's a
confirmation dialog so that you can change your mind about emptying
the cache. A large cache can cause some out of memory errors, since
the number of articles actually added to a subject window for
processing and actual display is the number fetched PLUS the number in
the cache. The latter number can be very large, causing apparently
inexplicable memory problems. Note that, if you have the option to
backup your prefs file enabled, you can "undo" the cache flushing by
using the backup prefs file the next time YA-NW is launched (the
article cache is stored in the prefs file).
• Changed how killing by scores works. Originally, as the various groups
of filters were encountered, as soon as an article's score dropped
below the kill point, the article was killed. Now it is not, and there
is a final pass through all the articles after all filters have been
applied to kill or not kill based on score. This may permit somewhat
more selective killing. For example, you might want to kill all posts
with "money" in the subject lines unless you're reading
alt.make.money.fast. You would then set up a global filter to score at
-500 all articles with money in the subject line, and a local filter
in alt.make.money.fast to score these articles at +500. Then the posts
will be killed everywhere except in alt.make.money.fast (assuming the
default kill threshold score of 0).
• The filter file (kill file) is now saved to disk whenever a filter is
edited, after the dialog's OK button has been clicked. If the backup
filter and prefs file is enabled, the filter file is only backed up
the first time the filter file is saved. Therefore, the backup filter
file preserves the filters that were defined at the start of a
newsreading session, while the active file is updated after each edit.
2.0b29
• Added support for saving files or extracting binaries from multiple
open windows. By holding down the shift key while selecting Save from
the File menu, all open windows of the same kind as the topmost window
will be saved. For example, if a subject window is topmost, all the
selected articles in all open subject windows will be saved to disk.
If a user group window is topmost, all the user group windows will be
saved. Similarly, if shift is held down when choosing Extract
Binaries, all selected articles in all open subject windows will have
their binaries extracted. In all cases, the way this works is that the
topmost window is processed normally, then the windows are cycled
through one by one, until you're back at the original window. During
the cycling, whenever the new topmost window is the same kind as the
original topmost window, the save or extract binaries operation is
performed on it. Note that this all happens sequentially. There is
still no thread manager support for doing multiple tasks
simultaneously.
• Similarly, you can send all the open message windows by holding the
shift key when clicking on the Send button or selecting Send from the
News menu. This works by rotating through the open windows as
described above. The difference, of course, is that each message
window is closed after it is successfully sent.
• Added a test and error alert when an attempt is made to attach a file
that has 0 parts (for example, a uuencoded Mac application or resource
file).
• Fixed a problem with editing killfiles (the expiration date was being
reset to 1 if it was non-zero).
• Fixed a problem with Filter Converter (if you over-wrote an existing
file the file's type and creator weren't changed). Note that the kill
file format is the same in 2.0b29 as in 2.0b28, so you do NOT have to
run Filter Converter again to convert a 2.0b28 kill file (and in fact
attempting to do so will only create an older VA-NW compatible kill
file, and not one that will work with the last two versions of YA-NW).
You need only use Filter Converter to convert a VA-NW or a pre-2.0b28
YA-NW kill file to the format used by YA-NW 2.0b28 and 2.0b29, or to
convert a YA-NW 2.0b28 and 2.0b29 kill file to a format that can be
used by VA-NW 2.0b27.1 (see the comments below for version 2.0b28).
• Added "regional" hierarchical filters, and removed filter menu
commands from the Edit menu into the newly added Filters menu. So,
there are now three classes of filters:
1) The global filter, with a filter group name ".". Any filters in
this group are applied first. The global filter group matches every
newsgroup.
2) Regional hierarchical filters, with filter group names of the form
"name1.name2.". These filter groups match any newsgroup whose name
starts with the filter group name, excluding the final period. For
example, if you have the newsgroup comp.sys hilighted when you select
"Edit Regional Group Filters" you will get a dialog showing all the
filters defined for the regional filter group named "comp.sys.". This
filter group will match the newsgroups comp.sys, comp.sys.mac,
comp.sys.mac.comm, and comp.sys.next. These filters are applied in
order of length. For example, suppose there are filters defined for
the filter groups "comp.sys." and "comp.sys.mac.". When filtering the
newsgroup comp.sys.mac.comm, first the "comp.sys." filters would be
applied, then the "comp.sys.mac." filters.
To enable editing of the regional group filters for the parent of the
selected group, hold down the option key when selecting one of the
regional filter menu items. For example, as described above, if you
have the newsgroup comp.sys hilighted when you select "Edit Regional
Group Filters" you will get a dialog showing all the filters defined
for the regional filter group named "comp.sys.". If instead you hold
down the option key while selecting "Edit Regional Group Filters" you
will get a dialog showing all the filters defined for the regional
filter group named "comp.".
3) Local filters, with names identical to a newsgroup name. These
apply only to the newsgroup named, and are applied last.
• Added a Filters menu item to refilter the current subject window (to
apply any filters that were changed or added since the window was
opened).
• You no longer get an empty subject window when all the articles in the
window have been killed.
2.0b28
• IMPORTANT! To prevent future problems caused by incompatibilities
between the kill file formats used by YA-NewsWatcher and
VA-NewsWatcher, I have changed the kill file type used and expected by
YA-NewsWatcher. The old file type was 'KILL' while the new type is
'FILT'. Included with YA-NewsWatcher is a simple droplet named "Filter
Converter" for converting kill files. You will need to run it to
convert your present (YA-NewsWatcher 2.0b27 or VA-NewsWatcher) kill
file to the form expected by YA-NewsWatcher 2.0b18 and later. You can
also convert a YA-NewsWatcher 2.0b28 kill file to the format expected
by VA-NewsWatcher 2.0b27.1. HOWEVER, when you do this you will lose
the marker hilight information for all your filters, since this is
stored in a different format. Converting in the other direction does
not lose any information.
To convert a filter file, simple drag it on top of the Filter
Converter application. You will get a standard file saving dialog.
Choose a name and location for the converted file. Note that you
cannot chose the same name and location as the file being converted.
• Synched with John Norstad's 2.0.0 final. Now that original NewsWatcher
has gone final, YA-NW can use more normal version numbers for beta
releases, and not have to add on the extra .0 .1 etc.
• Fixed yet another problem with uncollapsed message threads in subject
windows. I _hope_ that's all of the pesky buggers.
• Threads are now sorted according to their contents, and not just the
first message in a thread. So, if you sort by score, and a message
in the middle of a thread has a high score, that high score will move
the whole thread towards the top of the list.
• Fixed an apparent problem with updating the sample hilight color box
after it had been edited with the color picker.
• Fixed not being able to toggle the spacebar digest option in the
preferences dialog.
• Added the option to expire filters after a specified number
of days has passed. The default is still perpetual filters,
indicated by setting the expire time to 0. Filters are
actually expired when YA-NW starts up and reads the killfile.
An alert will optionally be displayed at startup when
filters have been expired. This is enabled under "Filter Options."
• Changed the method used to count words in message part 0 of
binary posts, to solve a crash on some old System 7.0 machines.
• Fixed the gibberish prompt text in the filter dialog's color picker
dialog. The prompt text is only displayed when using the old style
color picker.
• The preferences and filter files are now optionally backed
up before being saved when YA-NewsWatcher quits. This is
enabled or disabled under "Miscellaneous Options."
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 drawn 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 superseded 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 filters are applied first, then the local filters.
Processing of matches within a set of filters 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. This can not be undone by a
subsequent hilight or keep filter.
2) the LAST matching hilight filter wins, setting the hilight
color for the article.
The local filters are processed last so that their hilighting will win
out over any performed by the global filters.
• 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
Options 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 occurred 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).