MT-Newswatcher 3.2 released, for OS X

Almost since the dawn of the Macintosh’s use on the Internet, many Mac users have depended on John Norstad’s Newswatcher or one of its various descendants in order to plumb the depths of the Usenet — the Internet’s resident newsgroup service. Now one of the more popular variations — Simon Fraser’s MT-Newswatcher — is now available for Mac OS X.

The new version features everything that was in the last release, 3.1. It also sports myriad enhancements for Mac OS X, including a revised user interface which utilizes anti-aliased text in various places; a “Bring to Front” menu item that brings all Newswatcher windows to the front, support for copy/paste services via the Services menu; mousewheel scrolling; international support including Unicode in the clipboard; decoding of yEnc-encoded binaries; article-fetching progress bar; and many other changes.

Fraser noted a few issues and known limitations with this build of MT-Newswatcher:

Live window resizing can get very slow with big subject lists and anti-aliased fonts turned on. You can turn off anti-aliased list fonts, resize the window holding the command key down, or turn off live window resizing altogether to work around this.

Decoding more than one MPEG movie at a time may have problems. The MPEG importer QuickTime components seem to have some serious bugs which affect the progressive movie loading that the Movie plugin does. This does not affect MP3 loading.

Sometimes the floating Tasks window can disappear if MT-NW makes new windows while in the background. Toggling the Show/Hide Tasks window menu item will make it visible again.

MT-NW has not been tested on UFS volumes. You should keep the application and its saved files on an HFS+ volume.

MT-Newswatcher 3.2 requires Mac OS X and later; it will not run under Mac OS 9. The software is offered for free. Please visit the Web site for more details.