Xnntp - 0.4.2

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???