Version 2.0b23 ============== January 6, 1995. This version contains a miscellaneous collection of minor new features and fixes for errors that have accumulated since the last release a month ago. There aren't any major new features. New URL Features ---------------- Some Internet service providers offer FTP servers for their customers to use, but not HTTP servers (web servers). For this reason, some people publish their web pages using FTP URLs instead of HTTP URLs. When you open such a URL in NewsWatcher, your FTP helper program runs instead of your HTTP helper program. This is inconvenient. To solve this problem, there is a new checkbox option in the "URL Helper Programs 1" preferences topic named "Use HTTP helper instead of FTP helper for '.html' files". The default value is off. If you turn this option on, whenever you open an FTP URL for a file whose name ends in ".html" or ".htm", NewsWatcher uses your HTTP helper instead of your FTP helper to open the URL. We have tested MacWeb, Netscape, and NCSA Mosaic, and they all do the right thing with these kinds of URLs (they fetch the files using FTP, then display them as web pages). With this new option, you can have NewsWatcher use your web helper (HTTP helper) just for .html and .htm files, and still use your favorite FTP client (Anarchie or Fetch) for all other anonymous FTP files. You can now open Ph URLs in NewsWatcher. The defalt Ph helper program is the Mac Ph client. You need the recently released version 1.2 or later of the Ph client to make this work. Version 1.2 of the Mac Ph client is available along with the latest versions of all the other helper programs at: ftp://ftp.acns.nwu.edu/pub/newswatcher/helpers/ The official URL standard does not include Ph URLs, so Farhad Anklesaria (the author of TurboGopher), Steve Dorner (the author of Eudora) and I made them up. The following formats are all legal: ph://server/query server and query specified ph://server no initial query ph://server/ no initial query ph:///query use default server When the Mac Ph client receives such a URL, it opens a new query window for the specified Ph server. If a query is specified, the query is sent to the server and the result is displayed in the window. I ran out of room in the preferences dialog, so I had to expand the old 2 URL helper program topics into 3 topics. Errors Fixed and Other Changes ------------------------------ There is a new control in the preferences dialog you can click to go forwards or backwards one topic at a time. NewsWatcher now properly adjusts its MacTCP buffer sizes based on the kind of network connection you are using. (More precisely, it uses an Apple-recommended formula based on the "MTU" for your network connection.) This will make NewsWatcher work better with very high speed networks like ATM which require larger buffers. In 2.0b22, we tried to fix a problem with incorrect authentication passwords. The problem was only half fixed. It's all fixed now. We even tested it this time. With servers which require authentication, with the AUTHINFO USER command, NewsWatcher now accepts any response code in the range 300-399 instead of just 381, and with the AUTHINFO PASS command, it accepts any code in the range 200-299 instead of just 281. When NewsWatcher runs a helper program, if there isn't enough memory to run the helper using its preferred memory size, NewsWatcher now tries to run it using less memory, but not less than the helper's minimum memory size. This is the same way the Finder runs programs. This should make it possible in some cases to run helpers in low memory situations. Apple's Drag Manager version 1.0 can sometimes cause crashes with NewsWatcher. NewsWatcher now checks to make certain you have version 1.1 or later. If you have version 1.0, NewsWatcher behaves as if the Drag Manager were not installed at all. NewsWatcher now checks some of the preferences obtained from Internet Config for validity, using the same checks it does at startup when it checks for a damaged preferences file. Invalid IC preferences (e.g., strings which contain unprintable characters) are ignored. This prevents bad situations where damaged IC prefs could result in damaged NewsWatcher Prefs files. If you double-clicked a list item, held down the mouse button on the second click, and dragged and dropped the list item, NewsWatcher not only dragged and dropped the list item, but also opened it as if you had just double-clicked without doing the drag and drop. This was wrong. Fixed. If you opened an article by reference (by opening a news or nntp URL), and the article contained BinHex or uuencode text, and you tried to extract the binary by dragging and dropping the attached file icon in the panel area, the program crashed. Fixed. When your printing font and size was different than your screen font and size for text windows, sometimes NewsWatcher did not use the proper spacing between lines of text when printing. Fixed. NewsWatcher did not permit pasting 8 bit characters (e.g., letters with accents) into the signature field in the preferences dialog. Fixed. In the "Get Server Info" command, if there were accented characters in the header information (date/time, etc.), they appeared as garbage. Fixed. When you specify host addresses (news, mail, or ftp) in NewsWatcher, you can specify a non-standard port number by following the server address with a comma, space, or colon and then the port number. The old version only let you use a comma. NewsWatcher now permits underscores in host addresses, even though this violates the RFCs. Note, however, that if you use MacTCP 2.0.6, MacTCP will reject the underscore, and you will get the error message "Syntax error in host address". NCSA Telnet 2.6.1d4 now accepts the new standard "geturl" Apple event for telnet URLs. In NewsWatcher, when you use NCSA Telnet as a helper program, if you are using version 2.6.1d4 or later, NewsWatcher uses the "geturl" event. Otherwise, if you are using version 2.4 or later, NewsWatcher uses the old technique of creating a temporary settings file and sending Telnet an "open document" event. If NewsWatcher found an appropriate URL helper program, or you set one, then you later deleted the helper program, the error message NewsWatcher issued when it couldn't locate the missing helper was misleading. Fixed. NewsWatcher now works properly with servers on IBM VM/CMS hosts. When you had the "Save threads to separate files" option turned on, you saved an article or thread from a subject window, there was already a file with the same, and you told NewsWatcher to replace the old file, NewsWatcher appended a digit to the file name to make the name unique instead of replacing the file. Fixed. In some circumstances, it was possible for the unread article count to be incorrect (too small) in subject windows. Fixed. In some situations, NewsWatcher failed to properly keep track of whether it was running in the foreground or the background (e.g., if you selected a large number of articles, told NewsWatcher to open all of them, then switched back and forth between NewsWatcher and other applications). This could cause a variety of problems. Fixed. I am now using Metrowerks CodeWarrior release 5 with version 2.0a3 of Apple's universal header files for NewsWatcher development.