For years I used MT-newswatcher for my newsgroup activities, and sometimes spent hours hunting for lost pieces of multi-purpose posts, or wasted time downloading incomplete or corrupted posts that ate up space on my HD while I waited... and waited for the missing pieces which finally never materialized. Although often frustrated, I never realized how much I was missing and how much time I had wasted until I tried Unison.

Unison blew my mind with its superbly designed interface, which opens the first time already pre-configured to give you a highly maximized news reader, which performs like magic compared to earlier newsreaders I've tried.

The single feature which immediately stands out (and alone is worth the price of the program) is Unison's ability to track down all parts of a multi-part post and group them under one heading for a no hassle two clicks download.

On top of that, Unison allows you to filter your groups by selecting Messages, Files, Images or Music. Messages gives you a familiar MT-newswatcher type menu window listing all the messages in the group. The other categories limit the menu listing to whichever category you choose, displaying only headers for messages containing pictures or songs or movies.

The layout of Unison is equally impressive. Simple, easy-to-use button panels are front and center, always in the first place you'd look.

While newswatcher had a simple "Download" box that showed the basic details of each download stream, Unison's "Transfer" window displays each article separately in a rolling list, with all the details of each article (size, type etc) as well as a speed report (kb/sec) and a progress bar.
You can select the number of streams to allow, and the active downloading article streams appear at the top of the Transfer list, which automatically dumps it when it's finished and scrolls up to display the next active one.

In summation, Unison is one the the most elegant and user friendly programs ever designed for the Mac. It is also one of the most powerful, in terms of user effort required to get results and satisfaction. Newsgroup fiends used to MT-newswatcher (or similar programs) who haven't yet tried Unison should do so immediately.

There are a few tiny things I'd like to see. Both of these suggestions are of minimal importance; they would simply help to perfect an already near perfect application.

One would be a "mark as read" button on the group windows, a separate button next to the file display button console. Under the word "search" would be a good spot to place it, not too close to the file display button console, nor close to the edge where it might accidentally be clicked by someone navigating between overlapped windows.

Another would be a way to automatically group the messages displayed in the Transfer window,
so that removing a group would be as easy as it is to add them.

As I said, these suggestions are not critical. They would simply make a very user friendly program into a "lazy friendly" one.