Version 2.0b14 ============== October 1, 1994. New "Find", "Find Again", and "Enter Selection" commands -------------------------------------------------------- There are new "Find" (Command-F), "Find Again" (Command-G), and "Enter Selection" (Command-=) commands in the "Edit" menu. These commands search the contents of windows for strings. The "Find" command presents a dialog. Enter the search string and click OK. The "Find Again" command uses the previous search string. It does not present a dialog. The "Enter Selection" command makes the currently selected text the search string. This is a shortcut for copying the string and pasting it into the "Find" dialog. In group windows, the commands locate and select the next group containing the search string. For example, finding the string "dylan" in the full group list window locates the groups comp.lang.dylan and rec.music.dylan. If you already know the name of a group, and you want to quickly jump to it, you can type just the first few characters of each part of the group name separated by periods in the "Find" dialog. For example, finding "co.sy.ma.co" quickly jumps to the comp.sys.mac.comm group. This is especially useful in the full group list window. This new feature replaces the old keyboard navigation feature. In subject windows, the commands locate and select the next article whose author name or subject contains the search string. If the next matching article is inside a collapsed thread and the match is in the author name, the thread is automatically expanded. In article, message, and text windows, the commands locate and select the next occurrence of the search string in the text. Tip: "Enter Selection" and "Find Again" are useful when reading digests (e.g., the info-mac digests on comp.sys.mac.digest). Digests usually begin with a table of contents. If you see something interesting in the table of contents, select it, then use Command-= and Command-G to quickly jump to the interesting article. All searches are case and diacritical insensitive substring searches. For example, "A" matches "a", and both match any of the various accented versions of the letters "A" and "a". Note the difference between these new "Find" and "Find Again" commands and the "Search" command in the "Special" menu. "Find" and "Find Again" always search the contents of the current active window for a string. They do not involve any network operations. The "Search" command, on the other hand, always searches your news server to locate articles matching search criteria. I was originally planning to wait until version 2.1 of NewsWatcher to implement these commands. I changed my mind. I hope you find them useful. New "Mark Others Read" command ------------------------------ In previous versions of NewsWatcher, when you are reading articles in a group, you usually select an interesting thread, read all or part of it, then return to the subject window to select the next interesting thread. Some people prefer to preselect all of the threads which look interesting in a subject window, then read just those threads in order, without having to return to the subject window. Some UNIX newsreaders work this way. It was possible to do this in the old version of NewsWatcher, but it wasn't very convenient. To make this kind of reading more convenient, there is a new command named "Mark Others Read" in the "News" menu (Command-;). If you like this style of newsreading, do the following: 1. Use Command-click to select just the articles which look interesting in a subject window. 2. Use the "Mark Others Read" command. This command marks all the articles which you *didn't* select as read. 3. Use the "Next Article" command or its keyboard shortcuts to read through just the articles you selected. With this newsreading style, you will probably also want to turn off the "Return to subject window at end of thread" and "Beep at end of group" options in the "Newsreading Options" preferences topic. People's tastes differ. Use whichever style of newsreading you prefer. Tip: When keypad shortcuts are enabled, the "Clear" keypad key is a shortcut for "Mark Others Read". When main keyboard shortcuts are enabled, the ';' key is a shortcut. Main keyboard shortcuts ----------------------- The main keyboard shortcuts now work in group windows. (The reason they didn't work in group windows before is because they conflicted with the use of the main keyboard keys for keyboard navigation. The old keyboard navigation feature has been replaced by the new "Find" and "Find Again" commands, so this problem is history.) We have added the following new main keyboard shortcuts: A - Select All M - Mark Read U - Mark Unread ; - Mark Others Read Keypad shortcuts ---------------- The "Clear" key on the extended keyboard is a new keypad shortcut for the "Mark Others Read" command. When keypad shortcuts are enabled, if you press a keypad key which does not have any meaning in the context of the current active window, NewsWatcher now beeps and ignores the key. Preference changes ------------------ The "General Options" preferences topic got too crowded. It has been split into two separate topics: "Newsreading Options" and "Miscellaneous Options". The "Newsreading Options" topic is the first one in the topic popup menu. The "Miscellaneous Options" topic is the last one in the topic popup menu. There is a new checkbox option named "Beep at end of group" in the "Newsreading Options" preferences topic. When this option is turned on (the default), the "Next Article" and "Next Thread" operations beep when you get to the end of a subject window. If you turn this option off, these two operations close the current subject window when you get to the end and open the subject window for the next group with unread articles. The default value for the "Return to subject window at end of thread" option is now on instead of off. The "Zoom windows" option in the "Miscellaneous Options" topic has been renamed "Rezoom windows". This is more descriptive. Other changes ------------- NewsWatcher's memory partition has been increased from 1000K to 1200K. This change was made because many people use servers with very large numbers of groups (e.g, 9 or 10 thousand groups), and 1000K is not enough memory with this many groups. You can use the Finder's "Get Info" command to increase or decrease the memory partition size if you wish. Command-` is a new command key equivalent for the "Search" command in the "Special" menu. When specifying host addresses for news, mail, and FTP servers, you can now specify an alternate port number for the server by typing the server address, a comma, and the port number. If no port number is specified, the standard port for the service is used (119 for news, 25 for mail, and 21 for FTP). Control-L is now a keyboard shortcut for the "Insert Spoiler Character" command in the "Edit" menu. In the message window, if you check the news or mail icon when it was previously unchecked, if the Newsgroups, To, or Subject header line is empty, the first such empty field is made the current field. You no longer have to use the mouse or Shift-Tab to back up to the field after checking one of these icons. If you click the "Section x of y" message at the bottom of an article window, NewsWatcher now displays the following note: This article has been divided into sections. Use the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the window to move through the sections. Errors fixed ------------ NewsWatcher crashed with a "type 11" error on PowerMacs if you had the old version 1.0 of Apple's "Macintosh Drag and Drop" extension, but not the corresponding "DragLib" file. Fixed. On Macs with the 68000 processor, some of NewsWatcher's standard open file dialogs caused crashes. In particular, NewsWatcher crashed if you tried to change the uuEncode or BinHex helper program. Fixed. If you subscribed to a group which appeared in your full group list, but which had been deleted on your server, NewsWatcher displayed an incorrect unread article count for the group, and would sometimes crash if you tried to open it. Fixed. If you manually selected a URL and some white space in front of or following the URL, then option-clicked the URL or used the "Open URL" command, NewsWatcher did not properly strip the leading and trailing white space from the URL. Fixed. In the "Personal information" prefs topic, and in the personal information dialog, NewsWatcher did not properly detect clicks at the very left end of the "Email address" field. Fixed. NewsWatcher now handles quoted strings properly in email addresses. Long subjects (> 127 characters) were not being displayed properly as the titles of article windows. Fixed. When you had the "Return to subject window at end of thread" option turned on, if you were in the middle of a thread, and the remaining articles in the thread were already marked read, the "Next Article" operation did not properly return to the parent subject window. Fixed. Some news servers reject articles which have commas in the message id. In some situations, it was possible for NewsWatcher to generate this kind of message id. Fixed. When you printed multiple articles from a subject window, sometimes not all of the pages of the articles were printed. Fixed. If you used NewsWatcher with a news server which required authentication for reading, when you tried to fill in your initial authentication information in the preferences the first time you ran the program, it would crash after you clicked OK. Fixed. If you clicked one of NewsWatcher's icons really fast (e.g., one of the three icons in the message window), sometimes NewsWatcher ignored the click. Fixed. NewsWatcher was not properly stripping extra spaces from the "Followup-To" header when posting. Fixed. When you quit NewsWatcher, it updates your NewsWatcher Prefs file. If the disk containing this file was full, NewsWatcher could leave the file in a damaged state. Fixed. I no longer need to see copies of damaged NewsWatcher Prefs files. I have removed the special temporary code which saved a copy of a damaged prefs file and asked you to mail it to me. The check for damage is still in the program, however. If your prefs file is damaged, NewsWatcher presents an alert and uses the default preference settings. If you typed Command-S to save a user group list window followed by some other command key really fast (e.g., Commnad-Q to quit, or Command-Y to check for new articles), sometimes NewsWatcher ignored the second command key. Fixed. The "Extract Binaries" command in the "Special" menu is now adjusted so that it ends in an ellipsis "..." if and only if no default download folder is configured in the preferences. If you turned on the "Save threads to separate files" option and used the "Save As" command to save a selected article in a subject window and changed the default file name in the standard save file dialog, NewsWatcher did not properly use the file name you typed. It instead used the article subject as the file name. Fixed. If you dragged text to the Finder trash in a message window to delete it, then closed the window, NewsWatcher did not ask if you wanted to save changes. Fixed. In the old version, the "Search" command did not properly do diacritical insensitive Latin-1 substring searches. Fixed.