Re: Deluxe Newsreader for OS X

On Sat, 14 Jan 2006 18:37:08 +0000, Donald McDaniel wrote
(in article <140120061037080996%invalid@xxxxxxxxxxx>):
>>
>> Elsewhere in the thread I mentioned Pineapple News and that might be worth
>> a
>> try. It doesn't yet include a toolbar which may be an issue for you. It's
>> still a beta application so although it may not work for you there is an
>> opportunity to influence the development more than the established
>> newsreaders.
>>
>> Interested to read your feedback anyway.
>
> I did install the latest product. Here are few comments:

Can we just check are we talking Pineapple News 0.8.6 (and not, say,
Hogwasher) here? Some of what follows doesn't seem to tie in with PNews but I
will assume it is for now.

>
> 1) Configuration: Very difficult, and not very well organized.

Is this because preferences, accounts and identities each have their own menu
item?

> 2) Subscription of Newsgroups: Very difficult, and not very well
> organized. For instance, there appears to be no way to create a
> Subscribed Group list and drag and drop new subscriptions into it.
> Even Thoth has this ability.

Partially agreed but groups can be subscribed to by double-clicking. It was
the case that you *had* to use the subscribe button but user feedback was for
double-clicking.

> 3) Downloading articles: Totally "disconnected" from the
> Subscriptions, and not intuitive at all. I'm used to just clicking (or
> double-clicking) on a Newsgroup, and downloading the newest headers
> immediately.

You can either double-click on a newsgroup or on an entire account to
download headers. Double-clicking should always perform the most common
action that is available on the associated context-sensitive menu. I am not
sure just what you mean here. When you first use the application it may be
worth using the catch-up option to reset everything and avoid seeing
historical posts.

>From the help file:

"When you first subscribe to a newsgroup, sometimes you don¹t want to spend
forever downloading or reading possibly thousands of messages that are
already in the group, you just want to see whatever is posted from now on.
That¹s what the Catch-up function is for. It updates the saved state data for
a newsgroup to make it look like you¹ve already downloaded every article that
currently exists in the group."

> 4) Organizing Subscriptions: Strange and esoteric. A beginner can't
> use this product very well.
> 5) Threading: Still not ready for prime time, but has improved greatly
> since the older betas.
> 6) Sorting: Still can't sort on more than one column at a time.

I've wondered (and I don't anywhere near enough to answer) somewhere else
whether this is a limitation of Cocoa programming - I have NSListView
somewhere in the back of my head.

> 7) Filtering: Looks promising, but not yet ready for prime time. At
> the current time, there appears to be no "OR" condition (Just "AND" and
> "AND NOT". These conditions are not very useful to me.)

There is no filtering available other than killfile author so I am at a loss
to understand what you are discussing here.

> 8) Article composition: Fairly easy, but not yet intuitive.
> 9) Email handling: Don't know, since I seldom use a Newsreader as an
> email client, so I did not configure an Email account.

PNews is NOT an email client.

> 10) Worst of all, the downloading of headers was EXCRUCIATINGLY SLOW,
> even for Text groups. I normally set the maximum downloads per
> newsgroup around 1500 (this normally gets about three days worth of
> headers). Such a setting for 20 or so newsgroups is totally out of the
> question, especially when it is not possible to download an article
> body while Pineapple is still downloading headers.

This one prompted me to do a test, downloading a new subscription containing
84 headers in both Hogwasher and Pineapple News. Hogwasher took 7 seconds and
Pineapple News took 15 seconds. For a larger group (500 headers) Hogwasher
took 40 seconds and Pnews required about 105 seconds. That does appear to be
some difference and I will try to check that out further, thanks. There is
not a lot of disk activity in each case but Hogwasher does not continually
refresh the thread view, waiting until all headers are downloaded first.

>
> Something tells me that I am going to be unable to influence its
> development much, since Mac Fanatics will go out of their way to try
> get their useless ideas incorporated instead.

That's an somewhat bigoted view. They are only useless to you and me; clearly
a LOT of Mac users like applications such as MacSoup etc. I don't see it
myself but I guess they must work well for all those users.

>
> I'm just a former Wintel user, so no one will listen to me.

Bollocks! I would be really surprised if this application went down the Mac
route given its history. It was originally a BeOS application, one of the few
newsreaders available for that OS. A lot of the features that are in there
have come from user feedback; in my case the offline features, the ability to
display the user-agent header and to jump through messages using the space
bar, some of the keyboard shortcuts and possibly some of the toolbar icons
available.

Cheers,

Steve
--
The reply-to email address is a spam trap.
Email steve 'at' shodgson 'dot' org 'dot' uk

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