Every application has features
that you do not know about. Some are difficult to locate,
others might be right in front of you, but because they do
not appear useful, they are ignored. Every once and a
while its worth your time to take a look at an application
you have been using for a while and try to look at it as
if you have never seen it before. Your new eyes might see
something new that will save time and effort. I am going
to try that this week with our old friend Thoth.
Speeding things up. Here are a few ways I have found to
make things run faster. They may not always actually be
faster, but they seem faster, depending on how you work.
By boosting the number of article headers to read
(Preferences: Newsreading: Maximum number of articles to
fetch) when opening up a group list, you make your life
easier in several ways. I generally use 3000 to 5000, but
then I also usually use a broadband connection, which
makes life much more pleasant no matter how many headers
are fetched. For dial-up connections, 1000 seems to
balance nicely between grabbing enough articles to work
with and waiting for the fetch to be complete.
Another speed trick is to disable the Preferences: Article
Lists: Always mark crossposts read option. The purpose of
this preference is to keep you from having to read the
same article header if it was already downloaded as part
of another news group. However, the processing time to
compare all the article headers is substantial, and I’ve
found it easier to just skim over the lists and ignore the
items I’ve already seen. I’ve found that it’s
quicker overall to read some items twice than try and
filter them out before they are displayed.
Under Preferences: Fonts and Styles, there is an option to
set the Groups and Article Lists display font. Selecting a
smaller font allows you to see more on each page of
material, and I found that it makes it easier to scan of
the font is smaller and optimized for the screen. My
personal preference: Geneva 10 point or Espy Sans 11
point. Both of these typefaces were designed by Apple to
be easy to read on a monitor, and the non-proportional
width makes it easy to differentiate items vertically when
reading down long lists of items.
Selecting a specific folder for saving downloaded items is
another useful setting. Located under Preferences: Saving
Files and Preferences: Extracting Binaries are options to
select default folders for both saved articles and binary
downloads. For binary downloads, take a moment to
configure the Thoth Preferences to use StuffIt Expander to
post-process files, and visit the Expander preferences as
well. There, select the delete after decoding option under
Expand. Files extracted from Usenet posts are almost
always considered encoded, so it possible to configure
Expander to delete any encoded files after decompression
without being forced to do the same for archived files.
If you use Mac OS X, check out a recent addition to Thoth,
an option to use the near-standard Command-H to hide the
application. (Preferences: Miscellaneous) Many OS X
applications are set this way by default, but in Thoth it
is an optional preference.
For the Viewing Images preference, I’ve found this works
pretty well: If you enable Show Images inline, the image
will appear in the message window when opened. However,
since this method is less efficient than the extract
binary menu item, it tends to be useful mainly as a
preview. Since you probably will delete most previewed
items, it’s helpful to turn on the Inline Images Default
to Trash preference.
Next time, well take a look at configuring and using
filters. Until then, happy newsreading!
|
"What You Don’t Know Can’t Help You"
