Xnntp - 0.7.4

This falls so far short of what it should be it's hard to know where to begin. First, it's not multi-threaded, so everything that takes more than a second or two brings up the spinning pizza and makes you wait. In practice that's a lot of pizza when downloading a big news server, or even just opening a group. The UI is clunky and awkward, and took a while to figure out. When you add a server, you have to close the prefs then open them again to then get it to show up in the next tab where you can do stuff with it. If a server isn't available, it just hangs with no error message. The basic UI elements don't work properly - text fields stay highlighted when they don't have focus and selecting text within them doesn't work. This is basic stuff that the programmer must be going out of his way to prevent working properly. Even once you get it to open a message, it doesn't understand any of the common encodings used, so you'd need to have a suite of helper apps to view images, etc. There is no reason to bother with this when the free but far, far more capable MT-NewsWatcher is available.

I have downloaded this file, (0.5.6), two times, and in both cases, the image fails to mount on my Tiger desktop after extracting it from the bz2 archive. Developer, are you paying attention to user feedback here???

This version is much improved compared to earlier versions which were not very useable at all. It seems quite fast and unlike the other review, it loaded the entire group list from my ISP's news server. Subscription is very simple. The application seems stable and doesn't crash. It appears to thread reasonably well by subject.

The interface, like all multi-paned style applications, feels claustrophobic to me. That's not specific to Xnntp. It would help if messages could be set to pop up in a new window.

There seems to be no way to mark all the articles in the newsgroup as read, so that you don't have to see them again the next time you read the newsgroup.

It would be nice to have the standard Unix-style keyboard shortcuts for paging through articles and through group lists (e.g., space bar to page down or move through the article list). NewsWatcher derivatives (e.g. MT-NW) have implemented this nicely, for example.

The developer has made very good progress with this version, although in my opinion it is not yet ready for daily use. As a result I will check "no" in terms of recommending it, but I fully expect it to be a very good newsreader eventually based on the progress I've seen.