InterNews is a Macintosh program for reading the Usenet News. It requires an Apple Macintosh computer running MacTCP™. It will work under Macintosh System versions 6.0 and later. The Macintosh must be on a network that has a “news host” machine available. InterNews communicates with a service called NNTP (Network News Transport Protocol) on the news host. It supports the sending of mail using an SMTP host and some sort of user authentication service.
InterNews is available free of charge to users at educational or non-profit institutions. Dartmouth College requests that commercial and government sites purchase a license for the use of InterNews at the fee schedule and under the terms listed in the Licensing Information document included with the package.
The latest official version of InterNews is available via Internet FTP in <ftp://ftp.dartmouth.edu/pub/mac/InterNews_*>
Development versions of InterNews are available from time to time in <ftp://ftp.dartmouth.edu/pub/mac/InterNews_Dev/World>. Testers are always welcome.
This is a summary of the major changes since version 1.0. It does not include the list of bug fixes. A detailed history is available upon request.
New Features
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• Things, in general, are about 30% faster and more robust. InterNews is compatible with host news systems at more sites.
• There is a new optional window layout. To use it, click on the small icon that appears in the upper right corner of any reading window. Each Reading window can use either layout and the choice will be remembered for each window individually.
• The composing window font is set using a menu item in the Composing menu rather than by using a preference.
• You can select the font of each pane of a Reading window. There is a new "Set Reading Font" item in the Reading menu for this. Fonts are remembered separately for each of the two window layouts, but not for each individual window.
• There is support for the ISO 8859-1 international character set. To use it, choose the new "Miscellaneous" category of preferences and click the relevant radio button. This is a global preference; it is applied to all newsgroups equally. Note that changing to ISO 8859 will cause some confusion if you have newsgroups with 8-bit characters in their names. Do a tuneup if that occurs.
• You can process URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) using a helper application such as Fetch 2.1.2 and Anarchie 1.2. When you see a URL in the text of an article, you can command-option-click on it to launch the helper app to get the file. You can also access remote files and directories using the helper application through the new FTP Access window. Fetch is available from Dartmouth College under the same terms as InterNews.
• User authentication can now be done for users with the following mail systems: POP, IMAP, Unix, Vax VMS. In addition, user names can be authenticated using any FTP host and using INN news software configured for "authinfo" validation.
• You can scroll the bottom pane of a reading window while articles are being received from the server. You can scroll with the mouse or the keys described in the Help: Helpful Hints topic under Keyboard Shortcuts.
• The "Help" menu is gone. Help is now condensed into a smaller browsing window. To see it, choose "Help" from the "Windows" menu, or cmd-? or get it from the System Help menu.
Other Changes
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• You can print just the selected text of a Help topic, article, or composition.
• You can mail to addresses in your local domain without appending the domain suffix. Names in the format "first last" or "first.last" will work as well as single word names.
• The Net Monitor window can be opened from the Windows menu or with a cmd-Y.
• The "Add Newsgroup" dialog has a new design.
• The option-open-newsgroup operation now gets 100 articles instead of 50.
• There is a new menu command "Clear New Newsgroups" that will remove all of the newsgroups from the New Newsgroup subscription without deleting the subscription.
• Posting now ends with a new progress message and allows cancelling if the host has a problem. This previously caused InterNews to hang.
• Delete Subscription... now has a warning alert.
• Cmd-Shift-F will open the find dialog with the "Topic" button set instead of the "Newsgroup" button.
• You can set the maximum character length of lines in outgoing articles. This was fixed at 72 characters. Use the "Composing" preferences to change it if you like.
• Your signature can now be a full 80 columns wide. Make sure to set the maximum character length to 80 in the Composing preferences if you do, or it will get wrapped.
• The suggested memory is now 900 KB.
• Page Setup works correctly. Settings are remembered across sessions.
• Changed menu item "Set Network Configuration..." to "Set Host Addresses...".
• Messages are now tagged with a header line containing authentication information.
• A small improvement for downloaders: the "Append article to text file" now has a command key equivalent. (D for download)
• The command-space keyboard shortcut has been changed to command-1 so as not to conflict with the Apple Script Manager. And now it works.
• We no longer send a "Path" header line. Some news systems are upset by them.
• We send an extra line between the header and body of a mail message. Some mail programs prefer that.
• Whether or not you are using ISO 8859, 8-bit characters are no longer trapped when you compose a message. They are allowed to pass through. Be warned that some readers may not be able to understand them.
• Cmd-J now scrolls the next article to the top of the reading pane whether it is already visible or not. Shift-cmd-J does what cmd-J used to do (scroll the next invisible article to the top).
• When running under System 7, file names starting with a dot are allowed for .newsrc import and export (and anything else to do with files).
Requested Features that are NOT yet Available
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( These are on the top of the list for the next development cycle which, like the last, is currently of unknown duration.)
- Handling articles larger than 32K.
- Multiple selection of topics.
- Kill files.
- Marking cross-postings as read when read in one group.
- Detailed searching.
- Authentication support for MS Mail, QuickMail, LeeMail, Pegasus, AOCE, Kerberos.
- Binhex and UUDecode support.
- Saving your read-article information on a remote host (.ie .newsrc file access).
Roger Brown
Software Development
Kiewit Computation Center
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH, USA
Send questions and comments to internews@dartmouth.edu.
