This document provides a brief introduction to the new features in MT-NewsWatcher 3.0, so that you can quickly delve into them. More detailed documentation is available online, at <http://www.best.com/~smfr/mtnw/>. This document assumes that you are familiar with earlier versions of MT-NewsWatcher.
1. Read news on multiple servers at the same time.
MT-NW 3.0 supports multiple concurrent connections to different servers. That means that you can read news from several servers at the same time.
When upgrading from MT-NW 2.4.4, your news server settings become the default news server in 3.0; you can see this by going to the ‘News Servers’ dialog on the ‘Special’ menu. This server will be used by default for all group lists that you open. If you wish, you can create additional news servers in the ‘News Servers’ dialog.
If you have set up more than one news server, you then need to tell MT-NW which server to use for each set of newsgroups that you subscribe to. Each User Group List is associated with a news server. Open an existing saved User Group List (or create a new one). If this is the first time you have opened the group list with MT-NW 3.0, you’ll get a dialog that says that information about the news server cannot be found, so the groups will be opened on the default server. Click OK. Now, go to the Edit menu, choose ‘Show Details’ (Command-H) for the group list window, and a panel will expand to show a popup menu listing the available news servers. Pick the server from this list on which to read these groups, and save the group list. You’re done!
Now that MT-NewsWatcher supports multiple news servers, the news server settings are specified in the ‘News Servers’ dialog, and not in the main preferences. The same is true for Personalities. More information is available in the online documentation.
2. Set up multiple personalities for posting.
You can now have more than one set of ‘Personal Information’ settings, which means that you can vary your signature, mail or news headers, or your email address on different posts and emails that you send. An example of where this might be useful is if you use Usenet in both professional and personal capacities, and wish to use a personal email address and signature for some posts, and your work details in other posts.
When you first run MT-NW 3.0, it creates a single, ‘default’ personality for you based on the information you entered when running NewsWatcher for the first time, or based on your old MT-NW 2.4.4 preferences file. You can create additional personalities in the ‘Personalities’ dialog available on the ‘Special’ menu.
When composing a message, you choose which personality you wish to send with using the ‘Send as’ popup at the top of the message window. You can also choose to use a certain personality for some set of newsgroups, or when replying to articles that have been matched by a specific filter. The former requires you to set up some ‘Group Settings’, and have those specify the posting personality. The latter can be enabled by creating or editing a filter which specifies the reply personality—see the ‘Article Effects’ tab of the filter edit dialog. See the online documentation for more details.
3. View images inline, right in the article window
When you open an article which contains an attached binary, MT-NewsWatcher decodes that binary, and, if it is an image, displays it in the body of the article. The image is rendered progressively, so that, over a slow link, you can see part of the image as it streams in.
MT-NW will display images that it has plugins for (in the ‘NewsWatcher Plugins’ folder). MT-NW comes with plugins to display JPEG, GIF (including animated), BMP and PCX images.
If MT-NW encounters a binary that it does not have a plugin for (e.g. a .MP3 file), it will display a file icon in the article window (using Internet Config to determine the type of file from the file name). You can then drag this file to your hard disk to save it.
MT-NewsWatcher 3.0 will even handle binaries that are split into multiple posts, in the same way. If you want to use the ‘Extract Binaries’ in the traditional way, you can still do that.
4. Read and post articles in different languages
MT-NewsWatcher will decode and display articles in character sets other than the usual Western Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1), so if you open articles on a Japanese newsgroup, and have the correct fonts installed, then you should see the articles in Japanese. It is recommended that you make use of ‘Multilingual Internet Access’ custom install setting for Mac OS 8.5 and later to get the fonts you’ll need.
To set up which fonts to use for each language, go to the ‘Fonts’ panel of the Preferences. You can also customize various decoding options in the ‘Languages’ preferences panel, by creating Group Settings, and by using article filters. These features should allow you to make decoding almost error-free in most groups. See the documentation page on international text support for more details.
5. Post binaries to newsgroups
You can now post binaries to newsgroups with MT-NewsWatcher 3.0, by using the ‘Attach’ command in the message window, or dragging a file into the window. MT-NW will post multiple parts if necessary, and number them for you.
6. Index the contents of articles as you read them, so that you can search later
MT-NewsWatcher 3.0 makes use of Apple’s Information Access Toolkit (formerly known as V-Twin), the same technology that Sherlock uses to index your hard disk, to index the contents of articles as you read them. Then, you can go and search them later using the ‘Query Article Index’ command on the Special menu.
To turn this option on, go to the ‘Article Management’ preferences panel. Because this feature can result in some disk activity when reading articles, it is turned off by default.
7. Configure per-group preferences for list format, character sets etc.
Using the ‘Group Settings’ command at the top of the Special menu, you can set up options for specific groups, or sets of groups. Use these options to control sorting and threading, character set decoding, and posting options for this set of groups.
8. Many other new features, and feature enhancements
MT-NewsWatcher 3.0 has been two years in the making, and almost all parts of the program have changed in one way or another from the last publicly released version. Some of the more notable changes that haven’t made it into the above list are:
• Using the WASTE text engine for article and message windows, which means over 32k of text, undo, embedded graphics (images), and international typing support.
• Articles posts with MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) are properly parsed and only the relevant portions displayed. Messages can also be posted with MIME.
• The entire application is Appearance-savvy, and all the dialogs have been redesigned from the ground up.
• Extensive Apple Event support (e.g. read/write access to news servers, personalities, filters, some control of opening newsgroups and extracting/saving articles), posting.
• Persistent storage of information about which articles you have read, outside of the group lists (which enables marking articles read when you have seen them previously, even on another server).
• Filters can be exported in XML format, for lossless conversion to text and back.
• Enhanced ‘Custom fetch’ dialog (invoked when you hold down the Option key when opening a newsgroup), allows you to fetch articles by date.
• Ability to supersede articles that you post (replace them with an updated version).
• Options to get newsgroup descriptions, and to get the FAQ for a newsgroup.
• More extensive threading support.
The following features of 2.4.4 are still fully supported:
• Speech Recognition for most major commands.
• Support for Word Services spell checkers
• Menu Sharing support, allows use with URL Manager Pro and other Menu Sharing applications.
For more information
For brief information about a certain feature or dialog option, try turning on Balloon Help, and pointing to that item. If you want more information, full documentation for MT-NewsWatcher is available at <http://www.best.com/~smfr/mtnw/>. There is also a FAQ (list of Frequently Asked Questions) there, which will likely answer any questions that you have.
If you still don’t understand something, try posting a message to <news:comp.sys.mac.comm>, or, as a last resort, mailing the me, the author, Simon Fraser <mailto:smfr@best.com>. If you do send mail, please be as detailed and specific as possible about the problem you are having. Hastily written emails with too little information to reproduce a problem, or which lack your real name, are likely to be ignored.
