Multi-Threaded NewsWatcher

Current Version: 3.1 / 3.4 / 3.5.2 (August 28, 2006)

Since John Norstad releases the source code to the free NewsWatcher program for people to change, there are several variants of the program that add many features. MT-NewsWatcher is a multi-threaded version of NewsWatcher (hence the name) that brings a new level of usability to the NewsWatcher series. Multithreading has almost become a necessity in these days of Usenet overload, and the version 3.x series further enhances MT-NW's implementation, with an intuitive interface and smooth operation that will get you reading news faster than just about any other newsreader. Yes, it still has speech recognition capabilities, but a host of new features in version 3.x are, perhaps, of far more interest to most users. A few highlights include:

• Read news on multiple servers at the same time.
• Set up several personalities for posting, with different reply addresses, headers and signatures.
• View images inline, right in the article window! Non-image binaries show up as file icons.
• Read and post articles in different languages, like Japanese and Chinese.
• Post binaries to newsgroups.
• Index the contents of articles that you read, so that you can search them later.
• Configure per-group preferences for list format, character sets etc.
• Real-time pattern filtering in newsgroup, subject, and article windows.
• Newsgroup FAQ retrieval.
• Many other new features, and feature enhancements.

Version 3.1 (the latest "Classic" version) has some new features, and a lot of bug fixes. New features include:

• Progressive movie (QuickTime, MPEG etc) display, and MP3 playing
• More image formats supported (PNG and other QuickTime image formats)
• Option to use a more accurate way of counting the number of articles available in a group
• More message posting options
• Support for UTF-7 and UTF-8
• SOCKS 4 support (via the Internet Control Panel).

Version 3.4 (the latest Mac OS 9 version, which is not considered fully supported by the author) features the following changes:

• Junk filtering - MT-NW now has an adaptive junk filter that makes it much easier to filter spam out of your newsgroups.
• Inline spell checking - The native Cocoa spell checker is used to do spell checking as you type in message windows, complete with red underline.
• Email address auto-complete - The system Address Book is used to auto-complete email addresses as you type them in recipient fields.
• Better error reporting when extracting binaries - When batch-extracting binaries, extraction errors now go into a log window to avoid interrupting the extraction with dialogs.
• Auto-extracting of downloaded files - You can set preferences so that "safe" files that you download are automatically opened.

Version 3.5.2 (the latest Mac OS X version) is a must-have upgrade, bringing Universal Binary support for both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs. Improvements include:

• Secure News - Added support for news over SSL (snews), configurable via the server settings in the News Servers dialog.
• Secure Mail - Added support for SMTP authentication, and SMTP over TLS and SSL, configurable via the Mail Server tab in the Personalities dialog.
• Passwords Stored in Keychain - MT-NW can now store news and mail passwords in your Keychain, and not in its preferences file.
• Search Integration - The context menus in article and message windows now have items to search in Google, look up a word in Dictionary, and search using Spotlight (on Tiger). Spelling-related items are now also available in message window context menus.
• More reliable binary extraction - This version contains fixes for several bugs relating to binary extraction. Extraced binaries will no longer produced corrupted files, and the process will use less memory.
• Added the ability to create filters via AppleScript.
• Removed the ability to base a personality on an Internet Config profile, since IC is deprecated in the OS.
• The "User agent" header no longer contains "Intel" on PowerPC machines.
• Build PPC with gcc 3.3 so that it's compatible with pre-10.3.9 systems.
• Fixed the "Print" menu item.
• Authentication via GSS (Kerberos) now works again.
• Fixed SOCKS connection error on Intel.
• Fixed a bug that caused extracted binaries to be corrupted sometimes.
• Fixed a bug that caused files created by cancelled binary extraction tasks to not be deletable.
• Improved error reporting when extracting binaries.
• You can now Copy from the binary extraction Log window
• Fixed memory leaks when extracting binaries.
• Now use long filenames when dragging msgs from subject window to Finder.
• JPEG images now display millions of colors, which fixes color banding issues.
• Fixed some issues enabling menu items on the "Shared Newsrc" submenu.
• Fixed a bug that caused some window positions to be restored incorrectly on Intel (this was most apparent with the Log window, and I believe was responsible for a nasty hang when extracting binaries on Intel machines).
• Fixed an issue that caused MT-NW to complain that some URL helpers (like Fetch) are too old to use.

MT-NewsWatcher is one of the reasons the Macintosh remains the preferred platform for serious Usenet junkies. There's little else that compares with it.