A very basic NNTP news browser for the Palm Pilot Professional.
By Gavin Peacock
Now that you have a PalmPilot Professional that can connect to the internet, what are you going to do with it? How about reading news groups! NetNews lets you do that. This first release is very limited, but you can actually read all the articles you like.
You must know the names of the newsgroups you want to read because NetNews does not currently support loading a full group list. You can set a group to read by pressing the 'New" button in the group list. A group name looks something like this: "alt.comp.sys.palmtops.pilot." NetNews will remember the list of groups you want to read so that you only need to enter the name of a group once.
NetNews does not display any header information about the article other than the title. This version does not even display the author of the article or the date.
NetNews does not allow posting articles.
Articles you have read are marked with a dot, but NetNews does not remember what you have read once you close a group.
NetNews will only work on a PalmPilot professional because it requires the PalmOS Network Library that is built into the professional ROM.
This application is considered freeware. It is alpha software at best. Use it at your own risk. It is not supported in any way, and I have no idea when, or if, I will have the time to fix or update the code.
Setup:
Install the NetNews prc file onto your pilot.
Open the prefs app and select the network panel. Use the network panel to set up a connection to you internet service provider.
Open NetNews. A dialog will open asking you to verify the name of the news server you want to connect to. You can enter the name of your news server in this dialog. When you press OK, NetNews will attempt to connect to your news server. If it succeeds, the number of articles in each group will appear next to the group names. You can then click on any group to read the articles in that group.
The list of articles displays pretty slowly. This is not because of any limitations of the pilot or the TCP stack. It is because the application requests each line one at a time from the host.
There are better ways to do this, and if I find the time, I will make it faster.
