| Wednesday, September 1, 2004 |
14:33 - This time with feeling
http://www.panic.com/unison/
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The inimitable Cabel Sasser of Panic Software has released version 1.5 of Unison, the most jaw-tremblingly beautiful Usenet newsreader of all time. It's got a ton of new features, many of which I recognize from letters I sent him asking on bended knee for his consideration:
This major new version adds buckets of new features, including a significantly faster and less memory-intensive article storage system, the ability to mark anything as "read" (including files), a Mail-like Rules engine for automatically filtering posts, an improved Download manager, switchable personalities, .NZB file support, image groups, and much, much more.
It also, unfortunately, has a lot of significant bugs. On very large newsgroups, it seems, the database back-end chokes and dies such that after you've clicked a few of the image download icons, all the rest of the icons show up as generic "image" placeholders with "null / null" for the author and subject lines. Quitting and restarting helps, but only temporarily; it seems to be a fairly fundamental underlying weakness in the schema, and maybe it's just my system or the groups I read, but it seems pretty egregious and a usability-killer. So is the fact that Unison still seemingly doesn't use the content of each message to determine whether there's an image, but rather the inferences present in the subject line, which leads to image icons being presented for posts which are just text replies, which then become "broken image" icons when you click them, and revert to a noncommittal "undownloaded image" the next time you look.
But the features like sorting images by author, date, or size, and the general idea of the back-end database, are very encouraging. I hope Sasser is able to fix these showstoppers fairly quickly, because in the interim this is turning into one hot piece of software, one that I'm impatient at not being able to use.
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Brian Tiemann
