First the disclaimer, although its very stable this is alpha software and you run it at your own risk, the program and I do not accept any responsibilty for the any damage to your PC or any data loss. I'm also not responsible, if your PC packs its bags or sulks and refuses to run any other software or OS not written by a certain Seattle company. NewsBe has finally been released as open source...whooo ooooh See NewsBe's Source Forge Project page for details. Now the thank you's.... Thanks to Dirk for suggesting/allowing BeInformed compatability ViEd for starting me off with the GUI code. The Nettle C++ classes, with made the network code a breeze, and its NLPacket is used all over the place. Pixies, especially Frank Black, The Cardigans, JMS, DS9, Red Drawf for the entertainment. The #altb5uk lot for ignoring me while I tested the network code during the IRC meets.
What does it do? Its an offline News Client. Its downloads whole articles from a news server. it saves them to disk. It allows you to read all of them by pressing one key. Even if they're in Cyrillic. It expires them when you ask it too. It allows you to start new threads and reply to articles. Allows you to save articles to disks It allow you to forward a news article by E-mail via Be's E-mail daemon. Its allows you to filter files. Its has human readable preferences files. Its allows multiple news server (must be on port 119, which is the standard port). Try's to stay compatable with BeInformed's news articles. It has a resizable window that is dedicated to displaying articles. You can drag and drop messages onto the desktop, or just decode etc. What doesn't it do (Yet ?) It doesn't download newsgroup lists (well the code can but the option isn't there). It doesn't give you a nice GUI to control your subscriptions, (however it will do). It doesn't allow you to resize the front end (you need at least a 800x600 screen). It doesn't do mail except to forward an article. It doesn't do HTML, it may allow viewing one day via Net +ve but will never make posting them easy. Whats been changed recently.... 1.6.3 Alpha - First open source release. You can drag messages onto the desktop. If you lose the connection to the news server, Newsbe will now update the .subs file Very large article numbers will now be coped with properly. Finally there is a GUI based options window, for those of you that can't use a text editor :) 1.6 Alpha New features.... A new option, AUTOEXPIRE, expires on quiting NewsBe, default setting is NO Filters are now drawn in red on the group list to distinguish them from Newsgroups. You can now send Cyrillic messages and the thread list will be in Cyrillic too. Note for Cyrillic to work usefully, all three system fonts (plain, bold and fixed) must support Cyrillic characters. Bug Fixes, etc... Bug fixed a lot of the Cyrillic conversion. This is still largely untested. Improved the MIME Support. Optimsed the threading and message downloading somewhat. Cleared up all known memory leaks and clobbers. None of these affected NewsBe's performance, but they made debugging a living hell :) 1.5 Alpha The biggy.... At last a PPC version, R4.5.x only it appears. Compiled with the official cross compiler tools Bug fixes.... I found out that NewsBe wouldn't work with some news servers, thats been fixed. Finally fixed the bug where NewsBe would not strip the carridge returns from the first filter message. New features.... Amongst the new more or less untested features are uudecoding and MIME base64 decoding, found in the article menu. You can cut down the headers that are shown with the Article. Russian may want to try the KOI8R conversion (see the preferences.html) A few goodies for the Article Window. You can now have an article window appear automagically when you start NewsBe and you can alter the font size in the Window too, more detail in the preferences.html 1.4 Alpha For the first time this release has an untested feature. If you have a server that you have to log in too NewsBe will attempt to log in if you've set up the passwords file. Note at this stage there is no attempt to make this secure, this will change but as Be is multiuser yet.... I expect this not to work so if you use one of this servers put it first in the subscriptions list to save having to download again from the other servers. Now the good news. Start NewsBe up and press ctrl-D or alt-D depending on how you've got Be set up, or you could select Article Window from the Article menu. Up pops a window, if you were in the middle of reading your news then it'll have the article you were reading, if not press space to move to the first article. It uses the same one key unread news feature that the main window uses, and will move to the next group when necessary, as it duplicates the main NewsBe menu and buttons you can just use this window and forget about the old one if you wish. When NewsBe is threading a newsgroup, a floating window will pop up and tell you so. This was put in place so those that use the Article Window will know why NewsBe is not showing an article. Finally....... look an icon for NewsBe at last :) Behind the scenes... made NewsBe into a BeIDE project, and compiled a PPC version, if you want to try the PPC vesion email me, there's a link below. 1.3 Alpha Look up every one, I've altered the filenames for all the preferences files, just add a '.' to the front and remove the '.txt' from the end. Filters, the biggy, see the readme for more details, but it allows you to filter news and mail articles, it doesn't thread news in the filter groups though. It only got put in because a mailing list has got huge, and I quickly needed a way to sort out the other e-mail. Bug fixes for the threading routine, I may be able to remove some code that checks for problems that may have been caused by what appears to be a BQuery bug, and speed threading up a little soon. Some very limited E-mail capabilities. Once I could filter them, I thought it may be a good idea to do replies. It's very primaitive and likely to stay that way. I remembered to up the version number this time 1.2 Alpha Bug fixes for the date header in outgoing messages Changed the highlighting colour to yellow, means that the blue list items are more readable One key reading now fixed for long messages. 1.1 Alpha Some bug fixes, it shouldn't crash while threading after an expire. Won't crash if you end a new news article with pressing return... .signature support. Random tag support. A brief user guide has been added to the archive. So who should use NewsBe? People who don't mind alpha and beta testing new products. People who don't mind if the program crashes now and again. People who don't have a mad compulsion for binary newsgroups. People who don't mind downloading all the newsgroups they read. People who like to manually edit preference files. So who shouldn't use NewsBe? People who don't use BeOs R4.x for Intel or R4.5.x for PPC. People who mind if the program crashes now and again. People who have a mad compulsion for binary newsgroups. People who think that they save time by browsing online.<\PRE>
NewsBe <\P>
If you want to continue, you can read the preferences, and subscription formats
here
or download from BeBits .
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email me here for support. <\P>
Pleae note that this is ALPHA software, that I work for a living, and this is my first Be project. <\P>