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…

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