Please read all of this document thoroughly before trying to run Yet Another NewsWatcher for the first time. The file "YA-NW Revision History" documents the changes that have been made to the program. Please look there to see what has changed from previous versions of the program.
Yet Another NewsWatcher is a Usenet newsreader application for Macintosh featuring binary and anonymous remailer posting, article filtering (kill files), and article sorting. Please see PROGRAM INFORMATION below for who to blame for what.
What's included in this distribution:
• NewsWatcher: a fat binary version of Yet Another NewsWatcher
• a number of witty, informational text files, including this one.
You may also need to obtain one or more of the following helper or applications:
• Filter Converter: a application for converting VA-NewsWatcher or
YA-NewsWatcher kill files to the new format used by YA-NW 2.0.4 and later
• Base64: a helper application for decoding MIME Base64 encoded
attachments.
See PROGRAM INFORMATION, below, for the URL to the YA-NewsWatcher home ftp site.
If you are running YA-NewsWatcher after having previously used the original NewsWatcher, when the program starts you will receive an error message about preferences being not found, damaged, or invalid. This is normal. These are the preferences that YA-NewsWatcher adds for the extra features it offers.
IMPORTANT:
There have been some reports of people having trouble using YA-NW (bombs at startup, random bombs when reading or posting, out of memory alerts when opening group windows with as few as 40 articles). Most of the problems have been identified and fixed. If you encounter problems, here are some things to try/look out for:
• Set a reasonable preferred memory size for the application. The default
size seems to work for many people with full group lists up to
about 14000 or so. Increasing the memory to 2560 kB may help for
very large full group lists for normal day-to-day use. Please see the
original NewsWatcher manual for a discussion of memory usage. Note that,
if you have more than just the subject and author headers shown in
message windows, you will probably need to further increase the amount of
RAM allocated to YA-NewsWatcher, especially if you open newsgroups
containing many articles. You may also need to increase the memory
allocated to YA-NewsWatcher if you create filters that use other than the
standard subject and author headers.
• Make sure you have your location and time zone specified correctly in the
Map and Date & Time control panels. Setting your location is important
for the correct operation of the various date handling routines.
• Set a reasonable maximum number of articles to fetch, such as 600,
rather than the standard default value of 15000.
• Unless you're valiantly struggling with OpenTransport, make sure you're
using the most recent version of MacTCP (2.0.6), and have installed all
the appropriate system software updates (7.5.1 for example).
• If these fail, see if disabling filtering has any effect. Also try
turning off some of the other options that have been added in
YA-NewsWatcher (showing date and time or line counts in subject windows,
etc.)
• If none of the above help, try flushing the article cache (see 2.0b30
release notes below).
• As a last resort, trash your old prefs and/or filter files, and see
if that makes any difference. YA-NW should be able to read and
translate old version files without problem, but this has helped some
people.
PROGRAM INFORMATION:
Yet Another NewsWatcher is free. It may not be sold for profit or included with software or other products which are sold for profit without the permission of Northwestern University. Otherwise it may be freely distributed so long as the complete set of required files (YA-NewsWatcher application, all user documents and read-me files, the Filter Converter application, and the YA-Base64 application) are included in the distribution, either as one archive or separate archives within their own folder or directory.
Yet Another NewsWatcher is being developed by Brian Clark, based on the original NewsWatcher application by John Norstad and Value-Added NewsWatcher by Brian Clark, David Brewster and Bob Boonstra. Please report any problems you find to the author, but PLEASE read the NewsWatcher manual and the Yet Another NewsWatcher readme files FIRST.
mailto:baclark@wwa.com
The anonymous FTP site for the Yet Another NewsWatcher program, the Filter Converter utility and YA-Base64 helper applications is:
The anonymous FTP site for the original NewsWatcher program, the user document, and the CodeWarrior C source code is:
ftp://ftp.acns.nwu.edu/pub/newswatcher/
The helper programs used by NewsWatcher (all 3 versions) are available via anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.acns.nwu.edu/pub/newswatcher/helpers/
except for YA-Base64 as noted above
NewsWatcher (all 3 versions) requires a Macintosh running System 7.0 or later with 2.5 megabytes or more of memory and a hard drive. The Mac must be connected to the Internet, and MacTCP or Open Transport must be properly installed and configured.
NewsWatcher (all 3 versions) is distributed as a “fat binary”. This means that it runs in native 68K mode on Motorola 68K Macintoshes, and it runs in native PowerPC mode on Power Macintoshes.
For dialup use, NewsWatcher (all 3 versions) works with the various SLIP and PPP programs, and with ARA together with an appropriately configured AppleTalk/IP gateway. It is strictly an online newsreader, and it does not support any other kind of dialup connection. The program requires an active full TCP/IP connection to the Internet. It does not support offline newsreading, and it does not support older kinds of dialup connections designed primarily for simple terminal emulation. We have no plans to add these features soon, if at all. If you need an offline newsreader or a newsreader which works with older kinds of dialup connections, you must use some other program.
The original NewsWatcher was written by John Norstad of Northwestern University:
mailto:j-norstad@nwu.edu
If you have a comment, question, or suggestion about Yet Another NewsWatcher, please read the user documents for the program before writing to any of the authors. Most questions are answered in John Norsdat's user document for the original NewsWatcher. In particular, see the “Getting Started” chapter for basic instructions on how to use the program, and see Appendix F for a list of “Frequently Asked Questions” (FAQs) and their answers. If you don’t have a copy of the user document, you can get it via anonymous FTP. Hold down the Command key and click anywhere in the following line:
Additional information is contained in the various user documents that accompany Yet Another NewsWatcher.
Before writing to any of the authors, also please check the FTP site to make certain you have the most recent version of the program.
For information on licensing the original NewsWatcher for commercial use (e.g., for inclusion with other commercial software, products, publications, or services), contact Andy Rosenau of Northwestern University:
mailto:ar@nwu.edu
The program is based on the original version 1.0.2 written by Steve Falkenburg of Apple Computer. John Werner of Taligent is a major contributor. Thanks also to the following people who helped test development and beta versions, helped with design discussions, and/or helped with code contributions: Apple DTS, Steven Carmody, Steve Dorner, Adam Engst, Ron Flax, Aaron Giles, Haydn Huntley, Steve Klingsporn, Jean-Pierre Kuypers, Robert Lentz, Peter Lewis, Jim Matthews, Andrea Norstad, Jeremy Norstad, Lasse Hillerøe Petersen, André Pirard, Quinn, Howard Rafal, Pete Resnick, Craig Richmond, Larry Rosenstein, Leonard Rosenthol, Jeroen Scheerder, Michael Shappe, Eric Slosser, Stephan Somogyi, Neal Trautman, Dean Yu, Mahboud Zabetian, Willem Nijenhuis, Bill Stewart-Cole, and the nice people on comp.sys.mac.comm.
Special thanks to Steve Dorner, both for his advice and assistance, and for his “Eudora” mail program, which has served as a consistent source of inspiration for NewsWatcher in particular and as a standard of excellence for Macintosh Internet software in general.
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, BRIAN CLARK, DAVID BREWSTER, and BOB BOONSTRA PROVIDE YET ANOTHER NEWSWATCHER AS IS, WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY OR PROMISE OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT. NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, BRIAN CLARK, DAVID BREWSTER, and BOB BOONSTRA DISCLAIM ANY LIABILITY OF ANY KIND FOR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM THE USE OF YET ANOTHER NEWSWATCHER, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, INDIRECT OR SPECIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, EVEN IF NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, OR BRIAN CLARK, OR DAVID BREWSTER, OR BOB BOONSTRA ARE AWARE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, BRIAN CLARK, DAVID BREWSTER, and BOB BOONSTRA MAKE NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, WITH RESPECT TO THE PROGRAM, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
This version is NOT an "official, John Norstad" version of NewsWatcher. John can't and won't support it, and is not responsible for any bugs I've added to his code. It is also NOT supported or endorsed in any manner by Northwestern University or ACNS. All questions or comments regarding problems or support should be directed towards me and NOT John Norstad or Northwestern University or ACNS.
John has worked very long and hard to make NewsWatcher a powerful, reliable, and easy to use newsreader. He has also been very generous in making the source code to his version freely available for non-commercial use. Because of this, it's relatively easy to add features to NewsWatcher and have the result work well: John has already done most of the work, and his code is easy to work with. The restrictions imposed by John Norstad and Northwestern University regarding the use, distribution, and modification of NewsWatcher also apply to YA-NewsWatcher.
NEW OR CHANGED FEATURES IN YET ANOTHER NEWSWATCHER
This section documents the features in YA-NW that are either entirely new or which are different from those found in original NewsWatcher.
1) A number of small cosmetic changes have been made. The spinning beach ball cursor has been replaced with a color animated cursor (the small NewsWatcher newspaper icon, with a spinning globe). The panel area of windows is drawn in light grey. The icon pseudo-buttons in message windows have been replaced with genuine icon checkbox controls that are drawn in a 3-D style (as are the other buttons in the panel area).
2) The dialog to select folders has been changed to satisfy the Apple Human Interface Guidelines, and it's now a little smarter about aliases to volumes.
3) The subject line to file name routine has been changed to be more intelligent and to provide less mangled file names when saving articles to disk which try to maintain part (n/m) numbers in the file name.
4) The detection of Base64 encoded binary files has been added, with decoding via a new helper application "Yet Another Base64 Decoder." Posts with Base64 attachments will now be handled just like those with uuencoded or binhexed attachments.
5 A new item has been added 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 ...
6) The time that articles are kept in the cache has been reduced from 60 to 30 days.
7) The option to flush (empty) the article cache when quitting by holding down the option key when selecting Quit has been added. 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).
8) The ability to save or extracting binaries from multiple open windows, or send messages in multiple open windows has been added. 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.
9) Full support for binary posting has been added. A file icon button is added to message windows, to the right of the "send to self" button. Clicking on it elicits a file dialog, where a single file to attach to your post may be chosen. Clicking on the Send button causes the selected file to be (optionally) uuencoded, split into several sections, and sent. The keyboard shortcut for clicking on the file icon is Command-4 (just as Command-1,2,3 are shortcuts for the other three icon buttons). If the option key is held down when clicking on Send, etc. a dialog appears allowing just a range of sections to be sent. This is useful when reposting, as only the bad sections need to be re-sent (assuming that the encoding kind and section size are not changed).
Related to this, there are four new preference items, under "Message Files" (which was formerly named "Saving Messages" in John's version). "News part size in kB" lets you set the approximate size in kB of each section of the file being posted. "Mail part size in kB" does the same for files being emailed. Values of about 32 to 64 are reasonable. The actual number of bytes in the section will be somewhat greater, since this number does not include the header lines or any of the additional lines required to mark the start and end of segments, the encoding method, etc. Please also note that temporary system memory is used when posting files. The amount of memory required is somewhat greater than the value entered in the two "part size in kB" boxes. Using temporary memory means that you do not have to increase the memory partition of Yet Another NewsWatcher in order to send large files. In fact, since increasing the memory partition reduces the amount of memory available to the system and other applications, it reduces the amount of temporary memory available for sending attached files.
The two other popup menus, labelled "News encoding:" and "Mail encoding:" permit you to specify how the attached file will be encoded before posting. These popup menus also appear in the options panel in message windows (visible when "Show Details" is enabled), allowing the default value to be overridden for a particular post. The available options are uuencoding (the standard internet encoding method), binhexing (appropriate for Macintosh files) and none (for plain text files).
Generally uuencoding should be used for binary posts to non-Macintosh binary newsgroups, and for binary email to non-Macintosh users. BinHex encoding may be used to email a Mac file to another Mac-using friend, or to post a Mac file to a Mac-only binary newsgroup. No encoding should be used to post or email long pure-text files.
Note that the wrap checkbox in the control panel affects how unencoded binary posts are handled. If it's checked, then the file's text will be wrapped to 80 columns. If it's not, the file's text will still be wrapped to 1000 columns (which was chosen because that's the guaranteed lower limit for maximum line lengths for mail servers).
The name of the file, and the part number, will be prepended to whatever subject line you entered in the message window. For example:
Subject: My test post
would become when sent:
Subject: Jupiter.gif [0/1] My test post
etc. if you were posting a file named Jupiter.gif. The text entered in the body of the message window becomes the descriptive information supplied in part 0 of the binary post. If you are posting a file to usenet, you must enter a description of the file being posted. If you attempt to skip this act of consideration to others, an alert is displayed asking that you enter a description in the part 0 message body.
10) The ability to filter articles has been added. (kill files). David Brewster authored the original version of this feature in Value-Added NewsWatcher, based on some older code by John Werner of Taligent. There are new preferences items under "Filter and Sorting Options." "Disable filtering" turns the filter option off, so that all groups read after this is disable will not have articles "killed" from them. "Show filtered articles" is intended to let you still see killed articles in message windows (where they will be marked as read), but this is disabled at present due to some lingering bugs. "Expand threads that contain labeled articles" is pretty much self explanatory, it expands a thread that contains an article that matches either a keep or label filter.
There are three new Edit menu items. "Edit Group Filter" brings up a moveable modal dialog showing the filter criteria for the selected or viewed group, permitting you to edit or delete existing filters, or add new ones. "Filter this Author" lets you add a filter to the current group for the author whose article is currently selected. "Filter this Subject" lets you add a filter to the current group for the subject of the currently selected article.
There are two radio buttons in the Group Filter dialog which determine which articles are killed. If "Kept" is selected, then all articles not matching any kill filters are shown, and the ones marked for labeling are so displayed. If "Deleted" is selected, only articles matching the various keep/label filters will be displayed. All other articles are killed. Use this option when you only want to see a few specific articles within a newsgroup.
When editing a filter, via clicking on the filter in the group filter dialog box, or via a "Filter this Subject" or "Filter this Author" menu commands; you are presented with edit filter dialog. The dialog is intended to be read from top to bottom left to right as an English sentence.
The kill/keep/label popup is used to select the filtering method. Kill will delete matching articles from the header list. Keep or Label are pretty much the same, and will probably be combined in a future release. They mark the article as labeled and allow you to set the label color via the "Label" popup. A keep always overrides a kill. The second popup allows you to set the header this filter applies to. The third popup allows you to set the filter type. Currently many filter types are supported, including regular expression! I am using Extend Regular Expression syntax for the regular expression filtering. I will include docs on ERE filtering in a future release, so for now you're on your own. Ignore case decides whether this filter is case sensitive(off) or case insensitive(on).
A filter is applied to a group when it is opened from the group window. Filters apply to both full group lists and user group lists.
11) Other additions include article sorting in subject windows and digest scrolling. Bob Boonstra added the original version of these features in Value-Added NewsWatcher.
Subject windows can be sorted in a number of ways: Article Number, Subject, Author, Date, Marker, Line Count, and Score. Sorting by Article Number is the default sort order in John Norstad's version. Threads are sorted based on the article number of the first article in the thread. Sorting by Subject does just that, threads are sorted by the canonical subject of the thread (ignoring RE:, etc.). Sorting by Author orders the threads by the name of the author with the first article in the thread.
Sorting is accomplished by selecting one of the options using a hierarchical Sorting menu item under the News menu, or by clicking on the appropriate column label in the Subject window (when labels are shown). Changing the sort order when a Subject window is frontmost will resort the articles in that Subject window. Any new Subject windows use the default sort method chosen in the "Filter and Sorting Options" preferences dialog.
Some simple digest processing was also added by Bob Boonstra in Value-Added NewsWatcher. When reading an article, the 'b' key now scrolls to the first line beginning with "Subject: " following the current insertion point. If the "Spacebar digest shortcut" item in the Newsreading Options preference dialog is checked, digest processing is also mapped to the space bar. For both keys, the default space bar processing occurs if no "Subject: " lines are found. (Note that digest processing requires that the Main Keyboard Shortcuts" preference be selected.)
12) Added support for posting or mailing messages using anonymous remailers. Please read the document "YA-NewsWatcher and Anonymity" for information on this subject.
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Special thanks to John Norstad, David Brewster, and Bob Boonstra for making possible NewsWatcher in all its variations.
