|
There is a wealth of different and very capable Usenet news clients for the Macintosh. They
tend to be either freeware or shareware, although a few commercial products are also
available. Many of the current and most popular freeware and shareware applications share
a common ancestor, NewsWatcher.
Steve Falkenburg originally wrote NewsWatcher in the late 80’s, and when Usenet outgrew
the original version 1992, John Norstad of Northwestern University took over the program’s
development. John wrote in his autobiography that “Although the basic design was very
nice, and the program was reasonably robust and more than usable, it was very crude, and
it was never really intended to be a production program. For example, it didn't even do
word wrap! Mac folks on the network were so desperate, however, that they began to use it
anyway. So did I.” However, eventually changes in Usenet – most notably the number of
groups, which as I recall was about 5,000 in those days - and changes to the Mac OS
overtook the original NewsWatcher. Over the next several years John took on the job to
re-write all the original code, and add a slew of new features. It became one of the most
popular clients for the Mac.
However, continued changes to the Mac OS and Usenet eventually overran the abilities of
NewsWatcher, and John was ready to move on to other things. In 1995 (long before the
current fad of ‘open source’) John released his source code for others to expand upon. And
expand they did. Two very popular newsreader clients were spawned by NewsWatcher: Brian
Clark's "Yet Another NewsWatcher" and Simon Fraser's "Multi-Threaded
NewsWatcher." I’ve used both of them, and they each perform very well. Other
NewsWatcher variants include NewsWatcher-X, a Carbon compatible version, and the original
NewsWatcher, which is still available from Northwestern University.
On the commercial side, Microsoft’s Outlook Express and Entourage email clients both
include powerful newsreader abilities. However, because the news reading functions in
these two programs are not the main reason for their use (few users have chosen them just
to read Usenet posts) the Usenet features have remained pretty much frozen in place since
Outlook Express version 5 debuted a few years ago. And there is little chance that either
will be revised, at least as far as news is concerned.
The free Outlook Express only runs under Mac OS 9 and earlier systems, and since Mac OS X
already sports a free email client, its doubtful that Outlook Express will ever move to
Mac OS X. Entourage is in a slightly different situation. It is going to be released for
Mac OS X, although it is anyone’s guess right now if the Usenet news functionality will be
part of its feature set. Given the message traffic on the Entourage email discussion list,
Usenet functions are popular with only a small minority of users, and it seems likely that
they are not a high priority for the development team at Microsoft. My guess is that the
best we should hope for would be a clean port of the existing Entourage functionality for
Mac OS X. Mac OS X also already has its own native newsreader, a shareware application
titled Thoth.
There are several clients I’ve yet to mention; including Hogwasher, Imagina
Newstand, MaxNews, PixMachineMac, and more. In short, there are plenty of choices, and the best
choice depends on the user’s needs. For example, some of the clients work especially well
with binaries, others with plain text. In the next several columns, I’ll be taking a close
look at the specific features of many of the Mac clients and how well each of them works.
In the meantime, if you are ready to get started but are not sure where, grab any of the
clients noted here and take a look around.
|
"Usenet Client Roundup"
