Tuesday, February 17, 2004 |
14:01 - Noooo! Why, Panic? Why?
http://www.panic.com/unison/
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Every so often, something happens in the Mac universe that makes me scream like a little girl. Whether in terror or sublime transports of joy.
This is one of the latter days.
James alerted me to the news: Panic, makers of apps like Transmit (for FTP) and Audion (for MP3s) that are worth every word of the lavish hyperbole with which they're presented on the website, has really hit one into the left-field corner: Unison, a Usenet client.
And oh, what a Usenet client.
First of all, it's got an entirely native OS X design. MT-NewsWatcher? Don't make me laugh. I was a big supporter of that venerable tool right up until about fifteen minutes ago. Now, it may as well not exist.
Because Unison brings a bunch of new stuff to the table: it has four views of any given newsgroup, messages, files, pictures, and music. The "pictures" view is perhaps the coolest: it gives you a page full of adjustable-size thumbnails, which are just gray outlines with filenames gleaned from all the message bodies, until you click the little "download" button on the one youn want. Then the image downloads into the thumbnail and smoothes itself out. You can go clicking through the page, filling out the little dashed outlines into a beautifully rendered contact sheet, only zooming in on the pictures that you like, and viewing them in message context if you wish.
The "music" view lets you stream MP3s directly in-line, listed by filename rather than by message. The "files" view lists all attachments in all the messages, along with download status. And "messages", well, is just the messages (with attachments inline)-- multithreaded and beautifully laid out, just as you'd expect.
Setting up news hosts is ridiculously easy. You get a wizard dialog where you type in a host name; it authenticates it to make sure it's real, then asks you for a username/password if applicable. Then it gives you a Column View list of newsgroups. Straightforward, elegant, gorgeous.
Panic even hosts its own NNTP service now, if you don't have a favorite server handy. Good lord.
"I'd like it to do a lot of crazy things," Cabel Sasser says in a mocked-up screenshot of a news message. "Like group items into item groups, stream MP3s, and gently wake me up in the morning with a series of soft kisses on my forehead." And you know, it just about does all that.
This software makes me writhe around on the floor. It's that kind of thing.
And just when I was sure I'd successfully weaned myself off of Usenet. Aauuugh! Cruel, cruel Cabel...!
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