First off, thank you very much for trying my program. I worked really really hard on it.
I've been a USENET addict for around five years now. Ever since it started becoming important to me I've always had, um ... "issues" with whatever newsreader I was using at the time. But none of them were quite bad enough to motivate me to write my own. I knew it would be a big job. (That sounds so naive to me now. "A big job." Sort of like the way that, say, New York is "a big city." Yep, it sure is all right.)
Meanwhile, the tactics of a certain large software company in the Northwest United States grew increasingly irksome to me over the years. They started out no worse than any other big company but lately they've gotten so bad that I simply cannot continue to use their products with a clear conscience. So, it's time to move on.
So now here I am a BeOS user, but I've got the same problem as all the rest of you: There isn't any software! Now I finally had a really good reason to write my own newsreader.
And here it is! I bet I am more amazed than anybody at the mere fact of its existence. Writing it was so staggeringly complex and time-consuming that I can't describe it. I don't even want to know how many hours it took.
When a program gets this big you have to spend as much time worrying about its overall organization as you do writing code. I simply had to throw away large amounts of early attempts that just didn't cut it, so much so that I feel like I've actually written this program several times. Many has been the night when I paced around my house gripping my head in agony, unable to cram even one more tiny programming detail into my brain.
But ultimately I guess it was worth it. I still have a long ways to go with this thing before it's finished but from now on it's mine. If something annoys me about it all I have to do is find the offending section, do the work, and re-compile.
I hope you enjoy using the program as much as I do. I enjoy being a Pineapple News user immensely but being a Pineapple News programmer is more of a mixed bag. You should actually enjoy using the program more than I do, since you didn't have to go through the agony of writing it.
Allen Brunson
Coral Gables, Florida
August 16, 2000