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I'm finding myself in need of a UseNet Newsreader that can also fetch files and media... I found this on MacUpdate:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13984/unison

Anyone know if it's a good one... choices are slim and my next choice is for 10.5 and up only, I run 10.4.11.

I know little about UseNet either, I'm just going on a "learning journey"...

Any help or suggestions appreciated.

Thx...

Unison started out with a lot of promise, but Panic has been slow to fix bugs and add features. In fact, as you probably noticed, that seems to be a running theme in the comments at MacUpdate.

At the moment, they're trying to cobble up a Snow Leopard-compatible release. This will be the first update in nearly two years ( ), so everybody is hoping for some major changes (for the better). We shall see.

In the meantime, I've fallen back to using good ol' MT-NewsWatcher 3.5.2 (which works fine on 10.4.11, by the way). It's a bit primitive compared to Unison, but it doesn't have any glaring issues, either. Also, MT-NW is free (hooray!).

Thanks for the recommendation. Yes, I did notice the comments at MacUpdate, there is another shareware program listed there that seems to be getting good reviews however I am stil using 10.4.11 for now and it's 10.5+ only with no links to older versions.

So free is good as I don't see myself being able to upgrade my OS until the New Year, hopefully 1st quarter.

Btw, I love you for asking about Usenet -- brings me way back! <<insert nostalgic pause here>>

Back in the day I loved MT-NW on the Mac side, while I used Forte Agent in Windows. Since the demand for Usenet is obviously pretty minimal nowadays, unfortunately there's been very little effort put into product development and maintenance. However, MT-NW still works. It's too bad re Unison, because if it were maintained just a little, it would certainly be the best option.

Good luck with your foray into NNTP!

there were sooo many variations on NewsWatcher. iirc I used VA-NW.

Yeah, it's too bad about Unison. I jumped on that bandwagon right from the start because of the modern GUI, but it never did work as well as it could (should) have. But, as I say, there is some hope for the 10.6-compatibility update (whenever it arrives ).

Meanwhile, MT-NewsWatcher just keeps chugging along. Much credit goes to Simon Fraser for being diligent about its maintenance.

By the way, I fondly remember many of the NewsWatcher variants. Most of them, including VA-NW, are long gone. However, YA-NewsWatcher was rolled into Thoth (both created by Brian Clark), so I guess that one lives on.

Is Unison's main problem with any OS past 10.4x? How does it handle 10.4x? I wonder if there will be an update for 10.5/10.6 that would make it worth it.

I just got my MacBook Pro back from the techie actually after finally having no choice but to cave in to a battery not charging problem. I'd looked at the problem from every which way and I just did not want to believe that an I/O board that was replaced 2 years ago would go bad AGAIN... well it did. It was replaced and now we have a charged battery again.

Unison's main problems aren't mainly OS-specific. Users have reported freezes/hangs in every version of OS X that it purportedly runs on. Personally, I haven't seen the amount of crashing that others claim. It seems reasonably stable to me, if a little slow at times.

Nope, my real beef is the lack of timely bug fixes and feature additions. Some of the niggly little interface and usability bugs that people have reported seem to have been there since the beginning. Meanwhile, other issues are popping up as time goes on. The only thing that I can assume is that Unison is a low priority for Panic.

Having said that, I'm looking forward to the forthcoming update, whenever it arrives. If it lives up to its promise, things should be a lot better.

So, to answer your questions more directly... I think that you'll be fine with 10.4.x, and even 10.5, especially if you plan to use Unison for reading/sending posts. The GUI looks nice, almost like a mail client, making readability decent. Unison's binary-handling is intuitive, but the implementation is a bit buggy. Again, the little niggly bugs rear their heads here. With the expected fixes, however, things will improve on this front, as well.

I'm currently trying out Unison, on their 15 day trial period and it seems to be working pretty much flawlessly for me. When the trial period runs out I'll give the MT NewsWatcher a try and go from there.

There's another I found on MacUpdate called NZB Drop however their version, the newest is for 10.5 and up. I did track down an older version somewhere and gave it a try but I could not get it to work. This may have been my fault though in not setting it up right or something.

From where I sit right now I would hope that Unison gets an upgrade as personally I find it easy to get along with...

Well, it looks like Unison has finally been updated. It's now at version 2.0. The changelog states that virtually everything has been redesigned or updated.

I'v downloaded it, but haven't fully put it through its paces, yet. Time will tell if it's a step forward or not...

http://www.panic.com/unison/