NNTP readers on OS X are built from failure

In the office where I work we use/maintain a news­group server with a vari­ety of inter­nal news­groups where every­thing from items for sale to com­plaints and has­sles are posted. Late last year I went pretty much all-Mac, all the time, with a Remote Desk­top win­dow con­nected to a Win­dows machine in the office which I used for Out­look (because we're an Exchange shop) and Thun­der­bird (to read the news­groups). Won­der­ing if I could cut ties a lit­tle fur­ther, I looked into NNTP read­ers for OS X.

A small bit of back­ground first: I'm using Snow Leop­ard and I'm unwill­ing to deal with the vagaries of less-than-native clients. This means that I'm not using ported Unix apps. So no Gnews, news­post, Pan, Pine, Slrn, or Tin. Those are right out.

This left me with a list cob­bled together from MacUpdate:

• Uni­son, $24.95 from Panic
• Nemo, $14.95 from Mal­com Mac
• Mac­Soup, $20.00 from Ste­fan Haller
• Pineap­ple News, free from Allen Brun­son
• Xnntp, free from EDV Con­sult­ing
• Hog­washer, $49.00 from Asar
• OSXNews, free from Anurodh Pokharel
• MT-NewsWatcher, Dona­tion requested, from Simon Fraser
• MaxNews, $20 from Max­Prog

I had intended this to be a mar­gin­ally com­pre­hen­sive review of my time using these clients, but I barely got into the account setup with most of them, if I installed them at all.

Here's how it broke down…

Uni­son looks like crap; It hasn't been updated in since 2-26-08, and it has quirks under Leop­ard and Snow Leop­ard that I'm just not pre­pared to deal with. It feels dated, by which I mean it doesn't look good by mod­ern Aqua stan­dards; it also uses mul­ti­ple win­dows to man­age a lot of it's infor­ma­tion. It feels like it's really based around the file­shar­ing on Usenet, instead of being a general-purpose NNTP reader, which led me to unin­stall it within five min­utes. It's prob­a­bly the worst look­ing Panic appli­ca­tion (but one of the bet­ter look­ing ones in this list), which is unusual for a com­pany who is often con­sid­ered the van­guard of inde­pen­dent Mac development.

Nemo? So much promise. So god damned buggy. Poorly trans­lated. Unfor­tu­nately priced given the wide-ranging nature of the bugs. These are fix­able (and the price would be rea­son­able oth­er­wise), but the sim­ple fact of the mat­ter is that this client is an exam­ple of how not to use cocoa frame­works. Didn't even make it to "use" because once it lit­tered the root of my hard drive with empty files, I trashed it.

UPDATE

The Malcom-Mac site is down for "sched­uled main­te­nance" and the devel­oper of Nemo has stated his desire to squash these out­stand­ing bugs and pol­ish his soft­ware. I'll revisit this in a few months time.

Mac­Soup? No idea. It asked me to cre­ate a "set­tings file" to cre­ate a new data­base for news and mail. Obvi­ously doesn't get what "native" client means. Looks like it's using old quick­draw calls to ren­der the UI. Never set up accounts in it.

Pineap­ple News is free but the cus­tom icons look extremely janky com­pared to the "stan­dard" icons they're replac­ing. After set­ting up accounts it just hurt to use. It's visu­ally grat­ing on the eyes.

Xnntp has an installer. Aint no damned rea­son for that. It's a bloody NNTP reader. It doesn't need to cre­ate sys­tem files. OS X uses the appli­ca­tion bun­dle for­mat for a reason.

Hog­washer looks like an old Hotwire¹ client that some­one stripped the file­shar­ing out of and glued NNTP sup­port to. It costs a lot of money (and maybe it took a lot of time to develop) but it's just god damned unus­able. Trashed within minutes.

OSXnews looks awful too. Prob­a­bly works bet­ter than Nemo, but has a dis­tinct level of spit and pol­ish miss­ing. Never even got to set­ting up my news­group account. The author stated in July of 2007 that he was work­ing on ver­sion 3. I wrote this in Octo­ber of 2009, just to

I can­not stress how ter­ri­ble the expe­ri­ence with MT-NewsWatcher was. It is basi­cally an old Clas­sic Mac appli­ca­tion that has been updated just enough to sort-of run under OS X. It took a while to do any­thing, and it might be the worst look­ing of all of these clients. Appar­ently, Clas­sic Mac OS users love it because it still looks and works like a Clas­sic Mac appli­ca­tion. Just so we're clear, I fuck­ing hated the Clas­sic Mac OS.

MaxNews was down­loaded, but at this point I gave up and just installed the Thun­der­bird 3 beta. Is it a lit­tle overkill? Yes. Is it a lit­tle bloated? Yes. But it just works, and it works well.

So what hap­pened? I think that a few options are plau­si­ble: these devel­op­ers date to a dif­fer­ent era, with dif­fer­ent devel­op­ment mores and means. They may think that peo­ple still using NNTP don't care about their clients look­ing or work­ing like com­plete shit, or they may think that because NNTP and Usenet as a whole date to an era where peo­ple would just roll their own GUIs or slap some shit together in curses and call it a Usenet client, they can still get away with that sort of behav­ior and worse still, get away with char­ing money for it.

So, am I being a bit of a snobby dick and trash­ing devel­op­ers hard work?
Yes, I am.

But when the hon­or­able men­tion you give to Thun­der­bird 3 (which is in beta right now, and more usable than any­thing else I listed) is the best thing you have to say about Mac OS X NNTP clients, the whole damned sit­u­a­tion is in a sad sorry state of affairs. And if you're going to ask me to pay money for some­thing, you'd bet­ter give me some­thing worth pay­ing money for. So this attempt to review these clients has ended in abortive fail­ure, and con­ces­sion to get by with the least worst option available.