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.

First things first, I should probably talk about TextMate. Textmate 2 feels like vaporware.

Is it? Probably not. And in the interest of full disclosure, I wrote this post in TextMate using the not-utterly-terrible Blogging bundle.

However, it's been a few years since there was anything especially novel about TextMate, and this doesn't help the fact that the editor is getting a little long in the tooth visually. This isn't really a problem, as a good editor can outlast almost anything else in the environment surrounding it. Many, many cranky people still use vi and emacs, which have both outlasted the operating systems they were built for.

I've just grown weary of having to finagle and finesse TextMate into usable shape. Admittedly, the Green Moleskin mod helps substantially (good bye project drawers!), and the use of updatable bundles has kept this editor viable in these rough and tumble times. I just can't help hating the fact that I have to keep CyberDuck open if I'm editing something remotely. Lack of SFTP/SSH support really is all I'm wistful about. Finicky bundle extensions (the Blogging bundle specifically is what I'm thinking of) are annoying but they are decidedly not deal breakers.

The Challengers

Since I am a geek, and therefore always looking for a better tool, I began testing Coda ($99) and Espresso ($79.95 or $64.95 if purchased with a CSSEdit License; It's unclear if special pricing is still available if you already own CSSEdit). Both offer a generous, fully functional, trial period. Both offer promises of kitchen-sink editing (defined as being able to handle all of my editing needs without leaving the app, including CSS editing, script editing, and remote filesystem editing over SFTP/SSH).

Panic is one of the top old-school Macintosh software companies. Their webpage is slick and their applications are polished like some sort of granite space mirror. Coda is their relatively seasoned (released in April of 2007) web development application. MacRabbit (also an extremely slick, in the lick-able sense, Macintosh software development company) then released Espresso during March of 2009 into the same kitchen-sink web development market that Coda was fighting for. If:

• you work with HTML and CSS
• you work in a language like PHP or perl
• you hate Dreamweaver

then Panic and MacRabbit want your dollars.

Espresso

Espresso, editing a ruby script

I started with Espresso, as I am a regular CSSEdit user. As mentioned earlier I have had nothing but good things to say about CSSEdit, especially since they rolled in the live preview/x-ray and local override features. Espresso is extensible through the use of small plugins called Sugars. Unfortunately, this means that as of today it also has poor language support (the Coffee House aggregator shows that Sugars are relatively immature and that there is no best-practice or general standards for them yet.). Of note is that there is no real support for Ruby yet, which is annoying as all hell since most of my back-end scripts are in Ruby. You'll see in the included screenshot that Ruby documents are just plain text documents, with no syntax highlighting. However, HTMl, PHP, and Python support and highlighting were all excellent.

Interestingly, Espresso has none of the CSSEdit guts worked into it from what I could find. It's very much a web programmers editor, not a web designer editor. While it wasn't uncomfortable to work with CSS in Espresso, I found myself switching over to CSSEdit more often than not. I imagine that in time MacRabbit will probably roll CSSEdit and Espresso into a single application. For now though, it's more context switching, with no gain in productivity to show for it.

Espresso shows promise (it is a beautifully designed application), and the concept of workspaces is novel. I appreciated the ability to work on something locally while automatically publishing it remotely, and Sugars have the potential to be as awesome as Bundles, if not more so. But much as every child has the potential to be president someday, only time will determine if Espresso's Sugars are making me coffee for $6.00 an hour in a few years.

Coda

Panic's challenger for my hard-earned editor dollars is Coda. Coda does a few interesting things, like integrating the SubEthaEdit engine for collaborative editing and incorporating the Transmit core for remote file operations. As of late it also supports plugins, though I've been unable to really find much in the way of usable plugins, since they're a relatively new feature.

The kitchen-sink approach that Panic took with Coda also extends to having a built-in terminal, which can connect to a local machine or a remote machine, for code debugging, remote operations, or whatever you'd normally keep a terminal open for while developing. Coda is a very, very complex application, and that's ultimately the problem I had with using it.

Coda's weird autocomplete suggestions

Coda wants to be everything at once, and it's very good at most things that it does. The text editor never feels like it's holding me back, but one of the big quirks I found was that the constant language-unaware auto-complete suggestions are much, much more aggravating than helpful.

I also found little utility in the included HTML reference, but that's only because I know HTML and CSS very well (not that my blog layout implies this, but I do. Honest.), and for a developer who only uses HTML to present manipulated data, I can see it being a helpful reference. Panic has recently (as of version 1.5) added the ability to point Coda towards other websites as reference guides, and that's much more useful long-term.

Conclusion

At the end of the day the only real utility Coda and Espresso offer me is remote editing. They don't support any configuration file formats and their support for anything except "web languages" (ASP, PHP, perl, Python, ActionScript, HTML, CSS and kinda-sorta Ruby) is poor at best. TextMate has bundles for Apache, nginx, and SSH, as well as general support for any of a variety of key-value pair style config files. it also supports Bash and these are ultimately the make-or-break features for me.

However, I recognize that Espresso and Coda aren't trying to be the programmers swiss army knife that applications like Vim or TextMate already are. They're editors geared towards web developers. Unfortunately, while that is a sizable 20% of my needs, the other 80% of my work is dealing with configuration files every single day I am on the clock.

For the time being, it looks like I'm sticking with TextMate.

Follow-up questions

You might ask now "Why not MacVim or BBEdit? What's wrong with TextWrangler?" Well, BBEdit is an excellent editor that just took too long to have its visual appearance overhauled. It used to look exactly like a Classic Mac OS application running inside a Cocoa OS X frame. They've just released a new version that I'm told would be worth my time to test and no longer looks like a very powerful editor hidden inside a child's toy. I may revisit it soon and see if it's shaping up into something that doesn't make me want to punch my monitor in frustration. TextWrangler feels almost like borderline abandonware at this point and it's an extremely watered down programmers editor for the languages I'm working in and for the amount of work I have to do. MacVim is an excellent port of Vim to Mac OS X, but at the end of the day it is Vim, and Vim gives you AIDS. Worse still, if you use Aquamacs then your genitals will spontaneously combust.

Through MacZot

• Audiobook Builder
  This came with some sort of bundle that I purchased, and apparently I kept no records of it. I never used it, and I don't know that I'd ever want to, but I did technically pay for it.
• Disco
  Somehow Austin motherfucking Sarner horn-swaggled me again and took $10 of my money to contribute towards his inability to get a fucking hair cut. What was I thinking? Why did I buy this when Burn does all of this shit for free using the same publicly available OS X frameworks and with none of the lame bullshit UI?
• Hawkeye, rooSwitch, KIT (now called Together)
  Hawkeye suffers from one a pretty common problem in OS X, in that it wraps open source software in a cocoa front-end and then charges you money for it. Since I don't give a fuck about DVD mastering, it was an unused license. rooSwitch swaps preferences. Neat trick, but useless for me. However, in that same bundle I got Together (then called K.I.T., or Keep It Together), which has actually been a pretty handy tool for sorting and managing the sheer volume of incidental fluff I seem to invariably accumulate.
• Data Guardian
  This seemed handy at the time, worked and looked like shit when I paid for it, and now I cannot get the insanely over-complicated license manager on the site to recognize that I ever paid for it. High regret over the money I wasted on this Epic Fail application.
• Direct Mail!
  Came in another bundle (maybe the one with Audiobook Builder?) and it's another application which does something I just don't give a fuck about.

For Work

• Mocha MacX TN5250
  Purchased in my former life as an AS400 operator, I only regret that I never got my boss to comp back the $25 that I spent on this. It made absolutely every single night where I had to dial into work while on call so much easier. I haven't needed it for almost 5 years, but I'd still use it again if I had to connect to another AS400.

For Myself

• Acquisition
  God, who pays for file sharing? The developer (David Watanabe) is sort of an asshole, my license was constantly corrupted/lost/missing whenever the software was upgraded, and in retrospect, paying money to pirate shit is pretty fucking brazen. This was $25 I'd like back.
• Catalog
  And here we come to the first application which Austin motherfucking Sarner used to bilk me out of my cash. I had a library of about 200 burned DVDs to archive, and this app was the cheapest at the time. I paid for it, and like, 6 months later the last update was released and that was that. Buggy, featureless, slow, and unstable, this application alone is grounds for me to fight every single member of The Delicious Generation to the death.
• SKEdit
  Sean Kelly made software so usable that Apple hired him. While this has been supplanted by TextMate and CSSEdit in my work flow, I have no regrets over this. I used it often and it had the best remote site editing available at the time.
• XyleScope
  This application is awesome, but a lot of the functionality I needed has since been replicated (and extended) in the equally awesome CSSEdit, which I already had a license for. I keep it around for the occasional use when CSSEdit falls down on the job (maybe twice a year?) but overall it's just gathering the digital equivalent of dust (bitrot?).

What's the take away? I guess if you walk away from this knowing that Austin Sarner is a sack of crap, that MacZot pushes a lot of really mediocre shit with the occasional gem mixed in with the turd nuggets, and that sometimes even good software gets replaced by better software, then you got the message.

• The control panel to write human-readable, reasonable configuration files: This is where Webmin falls down on the job. The config files are valid, but god are they awful to read.

• No mention or hint of reseller anything: I just want administrative accounts running the show and hosted accounts with domains linked to them. Maybe some way for the hosted to monkey with the non-essentials of their own accounts. So on the grounds of overkill, pretty much every commercial panel fails my simple needs.

• Email support for something that's not antiquated: some panels use qmail (or some version therein, which hasn't had a proper update in years), some use sendmail (which is older than dirt and half as secure), and some use whatever the flavor of the month is (read: whatever ships on the supported OS distro). Me? I'm a postfix guy. I'm not wedded to it per se, but it's updated, feature packed, works well and its configuration is only modestly arcane (qmail, by the way, fails due to having an arcane configuration file structure that doesn't plug into antivirus or spam very easily).

  Regarding IMAP and POP support, I find that these panels often use their own "questionable" clients, or rely on courier. There isn't really anything wrong with that, I just like dovecot more (to be fair, DirectAdmin supports dovecot last I checked).

  I don't want to even get started with authorized SMTP support from these packages. God, the horror.

• No byzantine dependencies: Don't tell me that I need some god awful fossilized encryption library or ldap to make this system work.

  "Listen here, Mr. Control Panel, I don't use LDAP, and unless that is what you're using as a backing store for your hosting information, neither should you."

To that end, I've begun playing with Ruby and Thor to whip up some simple add/delete scripts (with initial success!), and the biggest stumbling block I've encountered so far is just parsing out the accounts that exist.

The Apache configuration file format is… archaic in its own right, being neither XML nor attribute: value pairs. It's readable, but there is a reason that an entire perl package (HTTPD::Config, which may or may not exist anymore) was produced just to scrape httpd.conf files.

I fear that without stepping back a little and engineering a proper solution I'm just going to wind up reimplementing what I encountered when I did overnight support for Reality Check Networks (no link provided, because, well, you know. Those dudes…).

I had been working on something similar, though admittedly much, much less details when this dropped. My interest in this was strictly personal, as I've been bitten by Austin Motherfucking Sarner twice now: I am a recovering license holder for Catalog and Disco.

Oh sure, when these apps were launching there was fanfare and banners and near-daily blog updates about the status of them… and the promises! Oh, the promises that were made to get my small amount of hard earned money. But where are the updates, bug fixes, or new versions of these simple apps? If they're abandoned, is there any notice that they're now orphans?

What really kills me about all of this is that there is a bounty of Mac developers who are producing amazingly well designed applications (that don't shit all over the human interface guidelines) at an astounding pace. Everything Panic puts out is quality, TextMate rocks my face off, and CSSEdit is still the best style-sheet tool in OS X for the billionth year in a row.

--

Venting aside, I know that this generation specifically can produce talented, focused, creative software developers who are interested in writing good software, not in offering engineering services without actually being a trained engineer*.

SKEdit is a wonderfully usable product, with regular updates, and a caring developer, and Sean Kelly is in the same age bracket as Austin and Phil Ryu; but no one ever lumps him in with them. Is it his lack of shameless self promotion (MacHeist, Disco, AppZapper, etc)?

Is it his ability to stick to a single project, and see it through to completion, or his talent for actually listening to what his customers want in the next version of SKEdit? Is he excluded for not spending his time on a flashy seizure inducing website or complicated marketing campaign? Maybe it's just because he's not a complete bag of douche like Phil Ryu is proving himself to be?

--

Oh, how I long to hear the rebuttals that the Douchebag Generation developers are going to wallpaper their blog-o-trons with. I suspect that when they are finally written, they too will have fancy shmancy custom designs, highlighting the subtle contrast between the babyshit green and pock-marked "too much Indian food" black in their endlessly spewing rivers of bullshit.

*As of this evening, Austin Sarner's self-named site offers "human interface design and engineering". As the friend of a number of real engineers (mechanical, electrical, computer, etc), I take umbrage on their behalf as "engineer" is a term that denotes serious andstrenuous training, study, and at least a modicum of testing before one earns the right to slap it willy-nilly on their resume.

Engineers build things that people depend on, not fluff people discard 4 months later.

CSSEdit has the most powerful and well thought-out interface I've ever seen for working with stylesheet properties, and its source-and-visual CSS editor is rightfully award-winning. If you've got to spend more than an hour a week in stylesheets, CSSEdit is the only reasonable tool for the job.

If you're more of a codemonkey, TextMate is the darling of both the Unix refugee camp that took shelter in OS X recently, as well as the Ruby and Rails development communities. It's sort of the best damned text-and-code editor ever produced for the MacOS, with the possible exception of the long-time heavyweight, BBEdit. The bundles are well structured, and support almost any language or variant you can think of.

If you're in the market for power editors, you could do worse than giving these two a spin. Of course, if you're the "all in one" sort, there is always Coda, by the boys at Panic. While it was slightly raw the last time I used it, if I hadn't already owned a license for TextMate and CSSEdit when it came out I'd have probably purchased it. It's improved considerably, and it is under steady development, but it is extremely web-centric (see the supported languages) and that might be a drawback for some people.