This document describes the various new features of MT-NW 3.1, and contains detailed information on the bugs that are fixed in this version. For full instructions on how to use the program, including details of the new features, see the online help at <http://www.smfr.org/mtnw/>.
New Features in MT-NewsWatcher 3.1
Ñ Inline, progressive display of movies and audio.
MT-NewsWatcher uses plugins to display the contents of binary posts to newsgroups, like images and sounds. MT-NW 3.1 comes with a new plugin, the ╥Movie Plugin,╙ that can display QuickTime movies, MPEG movies, some AVIs, and various audio formats, including MP3, AIFF, and WAV files. When possible, these files are displayed ╘progressively╒, meaning that you can start to view the movie before the entire file has been downloaded. On a fast connection, this means that you can listen to MP3 continually as they download!
Once you╒ve downloaded the entire movie or sound, control-click on it to show a context menu that allows you to save the file to a location on your disk.
Ñ More image formats supported
MT-NW 3.1 comes with two other new plugins, ╥PNG plugin╙ and the ╥QT Image Plugin.╙ PNG is an image format that is slated to replace GIF, and is starting to be more commonly used, especially amongst Linux users. This plugin will display PNGs progressively as they are downloaded.
The ╥QT Image Plugin╙ handles all the other image formats that QuickTime can display, like TIFF, PICT, SGI, TGA, PhotoShop, Windows bitmaps etc. This plugin has to wait until the entire file has been downloaded before displaying it (since QuickTime cannot do progressive image display).
Ñ Option to retrieve and use accurate article counts.
It╒s common when you subscribe to high-traffic groups, like binary groups, to see group article counts that are shows as ╥>99999.╙ However, when opening the group, you might find that MT-NW only fetches 30,000 articles. This is because the number of unread articles in the group is normally an estimate based on the first and last numbered articles that are present for that group, and article expiry and cancellation can lead to ╘holes╒╩in the list of articles present.
MT-NW 3.1 has a new feature that addresses these problems. Open the News Server dialog, select a news server, and click on the ╥Other Options╙ tab. At the bottom of that panel is a new checkbox, labelled ╥Use accurate (but slow) article counts.╙ Checking this will activate accurate counts for this news server. When this is on, MT-NW will fetch from the server the list of articles present for each group (which can cause checking for new articles to be slow, but does not slow down other features). It uses that list to calculate exact counts of unread articles, and, when you open the group specifying how many articles to fetch, to fetch exactly the number you specify.
Ñ Ability to choose which server to use when posting, and whether to post using MIME.
Several options for message windows that were not available in the UI are now exposed via a ╥Message Options╙ dialog box. To open this, have a message window foremost, and choose the ╥Message Options╔╙ item on the Edit menu, or Show Headers (Command-H) on the window, and click the ╥Options╔╙ button. The resulting dialog lets you choose which server to send this message to, whether to format the message using MIME, what wrap width to use, and, if you are posting binaries, what the maximum number of lines per post is.
Ñ Support for display of UTF-7 and UTF-8, and sending of UTF-8.
MT-NW 3.1 now correctly detects and decodes UTF-7 and UTF-8 posts when reading news. It also allows you to post messages in UTF-8. You can set the default encoding to use when posting in the ╥Languages╙╩preferences panel, and per-group in the ╥Group Settings╙╩dialog. For a single message, you can also choose UTF-8 from the list of encodings in the popups under the Text Encoding tab (Show Headers to see this).
Ñ SOCKS 4 support (for firewalls)
If your Internet Config settings are set to use SOCKS, MT-NW will use the SOCKS server specified for NNTP connections. You may want to use SOCKS if you are behind a firewall which is configured to not allow NNTP connections. To change the SOCKS settings in Internet Config, open the Internet Control Panel. Choose the ╥Advanced╙╩tab. (If no ╥Advanced╙╩tab is showing, use the ╥User Mode╙╩command in the Edit menu to go to ╥Normal╙╩user mode.). Under this tab, click on ╥Firewalls╙╩in the list, check the ╥SOCKS Firewall╙ checkbox, and enter the SOCKS host name and port (which you should get from your network administrator).
Bug fixes and performance improvements
This is an incomplete list of the bug fixes between MT-NW 3.0 and 3.1.
Group opening:
* Make group fetching somewhat faster, hopefully fixing a bug in 9.1 that caused long delays here.
* Added ability to fetch the oldest articles in the group, if holding down the option key on group opening.
* More reliable threading of binary articles
* Fixed some problems with the article cache causing the number of unread articles in the group to get out of sync.
* Improved memory use, particularly when opening large groups.
* Fixed a bug that caused MT-NW to exceed the max number of server connections when opening several news group files simultaneously.
* The ╘Mark read across servers╒ setting is now controllable on a per-group basis via Group Settings.
* Added a per-server option to fetch the exact list of which articles are present in each group, which allows accurate counts of unread articles, and more precise fetching of numbers of articles.
* Reduced the maximum number of connections per server from 6 to 4, to reduce server load.
Article display and printing:
* Articles no longer show with a blank line at the bottom.
* Scrolling through a digest now scrolls so that the highlighted ╥Subject:╙ line is near the top, instead of in the middle.
* A read-only caret is visible in article windows now, after you click.
* Added a few new commands to context menus, like ROT13.
* Fixed a problem where printing just the selection in an article window would use the wrong font.
* Made the program more robust when the user makes changes to an article window whose contents are still being fetched from the server.
* Minor fixes to the URL parsing code, to better handle command-clicking on news: URLs vs. raw message-IDs.
* Fixed bugs with the display of MIME messages, and made the MIME parsing more robust.
* Fixed a bug that caused trailing periods in articles to sometimes not be displayed.
* Better hiding and showing of the cursor when fetching articles.
Message compose:
* Fixed a problem that caused MT-NW to sometimes fail to detect when the author is posting a message with only quoted text.
* More reliable Word Services helper application support.
* Better wrapping of the attribution line
* Fixed a problem that caused escape characters to get stripped from files containing encoded Japanese text on saving.
* Exposed a number of options on the message window via an ╘Options╔╒ dialog, including whether to send with MIME, and which server to post to.
* Fixed a problem that caused the message window to come up very wide if your prefs were set to use large font sizes.
* Made undo in the message window more reliable.
* Tweaked line wrapping on reply such that lines are less likely to be unnecessarily wrapped when quoting.
* Line wrapping is now double-byte aware, and won't split double-byte characters.
* Fixed a number of bugs with the persistence of options in saved messages.
* Protect against multiple clicks of the send button in the message window sending multiple copies of the message.
* Always use Quoted Printable when encoding headers when sending with MIME now, even when sending with charset ISO-8859-1.
International Text handling:
* Improved decoding and editing of international text, and better handling of articles with corrupted encoded text.
* Better detection of some character sets, such as HZ.
Binaries and downloading:
* Fixed some bugs in saving to files from different threads.
* Fixed a serious memory leak in image display.
* Rewrote the plugin API to use CFM entry points.
* Added plugins for PNG, other image formats that QuickTime supports, and QuickTime movie and audio formats.
Personalities:
* You can now paste more than 256 characters into the Signature dialog.
* Added an option to the signature dialog of the personalities to have the signature inserted into the end of the body text, rather than in a separate field. This can be useful for PGP signing.
News servers:
* Changed the way that message-IDs are generated, to use a reverse DNS lookup on the news server╒s address rather than using your Mac╒s IP address, to increase privacy. Also fixed a bug that caused the generation of illegal message-IDs when the user╒s news server address was in host:port format.
Filters:
* Made the filter saving code more reliable, and added the ability to do a ╘Save As╔╒ on the Filters window. Also, double-clicking a filters file in the Finder is handled better now.
General:
* The about window shows article cache size
* Holding down the option key on startup shows a dialog that allows you to clear the article cache.
* Errors on startup are handled better now.
* Improved Apple Events support (scriptable message posting, for example).
* Implemented the Revert command to the File menu.
* Made more alert dialogs non-blocking, to reduce the frequency with which a dialog stalls other threads.
* Telling MT-NW to quit via an Applescript works again now.
* Fixed some bugs with text drawing over itself, when video mirroring was turned on.
* Improved detection and handling of corrupted database files.
