Version 2.0b10 
==============

September 11, 1994.


This new version contains a collection of miscellaneous changes to features, some
changes to attempt to solve the damaged prefs file problem, and several fixes for
other errors in the program.


Changes to features 
-------------------

The "Next Article" operation has been changed. When you get to the last article
in a thread, NewsWatcher now closes the article window and selects the next
thread in the parent subject window, but it does not open the first article of
the next thread. Many people asked for this change, and we discussed it at great
length on comp.sys.mac.comm. I hope you like it. It takes some getting use to.
Note that this change applies to all the "Next Article" operations, including the
command in the "News" menu and all of its keyboard shortcuts, including the space
bar and the keypad '5' key. You should use the "Next Thread" operation if you
really want to open the next thread without returning to the subject window. (I'm
still not sure about this "feature", and I consider this to be an experiment. I
may need to make a new preference to let you pick the old behavour or the new
behavour.)

Similarly, the "Next Article" and "Next Thread" operations no longer advance to
the next group when you reach the end of a subject window. Instead, NewsWatcher
now simply beeps in this situation. You should use the "Next Group" operation if
you wish to mark everything read and advance to the next group.

There is a new "Open URL" command in the "Special" menu. This command is
equivalent to option-clicking a URL. It opens the selected URL or the URL
containing the current insertion point in an article, message, or text window.
The command is disabled if the current selection is not a URL or slack URL, or if
the current insertion point is not within a URL or slack URL.

NewsWatcher now displays the full "From" header in the panel area of article
windows, including the author's email address, instead of just the author's name.

When you send a message as both a posted news article and as a mail message, the
mail message header now includes the Newsgroups, Followup-to, and Distribution
header lines.

The checkmarks next to the news, mail, and self icons in message windows are now
"hot". You can click the checkmarks to turn the options on and off. You no longer
have to click the icons themselves.

When you click the padlock icon in article and subject windows, the hilighting is
less ugly.

Intelligent cut and paste has been improved. The old version was removing and
adding extra space characters too often.

When opening a new message window, NewsWatcher now sets the width of the window
to just wide enough to contain 80 "W" characters. The previous version used 80
times the width of the widest character in the font, which was often much too
wide with non-monospaced fonts.

On extended keyboards, the first four function keys F1, F2, F3, and F4 at the top
of the keyboard are now shortcuts for the Undo, Cut, Copy, and Paste commands.

When checking for BinHex or uuencode text, NewsWatcher now requires that the
lines of encoded text contain at least two different characters. This improvement
to the heuristics avoids incorrectly identifying, for example, two successive
long lines of all dashes as the beginning of encoded text in a subsequent part of
a multiple part article.

When you quit NewsWatcher, it closes all of its windows and tries to save any
changes you have made. In the previous version, if any errors ocurred when trying
to close a window or save changes, NewsWatcher reported the error and returned to
the program without quitting. In some circumstances, this made it difficult to
quit the program. E.g., if you used the the "Automatically get/put newsrc"
option, you lost your server connection, and NewsWatcher got an error when it
tried to automatically send your newsrc file to the remote host when you quit. In
the new version, if an error occurs during quitting, NewsWatcher presents an
alert asking if you want to quit without saving any changed windows or return to
the program.


Damaged prefs files 
-------------------

Several people have experienced damaged NewsWatcher Prefs files with the recent
beta versions of NewsWatcher. We've made several changes in an attempt to solve
this problem.

First, after closing a file, NewsWatcher now always flushes the volume containing
the file. In particular, when you quit NewsWatcher and NewsWatcher rewrites the
prefs file, it now makes certain that the disk cache is flushed so that the new
prefs file is completely written to disk. Many of the people who experienced
damaged prefs files reported that the damage happened after an unrelated system
crash which happened after quitting NewsWatcher. This change should fix that kind
of damage.

Second, when you quit the program and NewsWatcher writes the prefs file, it now
writes the file before initiating the asynchronous close of the news server
connection. In the old version, crashes or other problems which might occur
during the asynchronous close process could in theory cause problems with the
process of updating the prefs file. This change will make quitting NewsWatcher
take just a little bit longer, but the extra time should be unnoticeable.

I don't know whether these two changes will completely solve the problem of
damaged prefs files, but they should help.

NewsWatcher also now does some minimal sanity checking of the saved preferences
when it starts up and reads your preferences file. If the preferences are damaged
or invalid, the program issues an error message and uses the default preference
options.

In previous versions, if your preferences file was damaged, NewsWatcher often
mistakenly thought that the prefs file was created by an older version of the
program and as a result read the first part of your saved full group list as your
preferences. This was very nasty and very confusing. The new sanity check for
damaged preferences eliminates this problem.

As a special temporary aid to help track down the cause of these damaged prefs
files, after telling you that your preferences file is damaged, NewsWatcher
2.0b10 presents a second alert offering to save a copy of the damaged file on
your desktop as the file named "Bad NewsWatcher Prefs". If you experience a
damaged preferences file with 2.0b10, please do this, and mail a copy of the bad
file to me later. By analyzing the damaged file, I might be able to get a clue as
to what is causing the damage. If and when we fix any remaining problems which
might be causing damaged prefs files, I will remove this temporary feature.


Errors fixed 
------------

NewsWatcher saves the full group list on its preferences file when you quit. In
the old version, with large full group lists (e.g., more than 9000 groups), the
program ran out of memory, and it had to fetch a new full group list from the
server the next time you ran the program. The new version uses much less memory
for this operation, so this should no longer be a problem.

Dragging and dropping articles from subject windows to the Finder to save them
did not work properly when the "Save threads to separate files" option was turned
on. Sometimes this resulted in an "unexpected" error number -50 or -37. Other
times this resulted in two files being created for the first saved thread, with
one of the files empty. The same problem could sometimes cause "unexpected" error
number -50 or -37 in other circumstances when saving articles.  These errors are
all fixed.

In native mode on PowerMacs, dragging groups within a user group list window to
move them did not work correctly if the window was scrolled during the move - the
wrong group or groups were moved. Fixed.

NewsWatcher uses Apple's List Manager for group and subject lists. Because of
limitations of the List Manager, group and subject lists are limited to a maximum
of 16,383 items. NewsWatcher now checks all lists to make certain that this limit
is not exceeded, and takes appropriate action and issues an appropriate error
message if it is. As part of this change, the "max articles to fetch" preference
is now pinned to the range [1,15000]. In the old version, if you typed a large
number of articles, it would end up being incorrectly interpreted as a negative
number. This no longer happens - in the new version, if you type anything larger
than 15000, the number is changed to 15000.

When you use the "FTP Helper" preferences topic to select Fetch or Anarchie,
NewsWatcher checks to see if you have a new enough version of the helper program,
and issues an error message if the version is too old. The error message dialog
was not being presented properly, and bizarre behaviour could result in some
circumstances. Fixed.

If you used the "Authentication" preferences topic to change your username, and
you had the "Always authenticate" option turned on, in some unusual cases
NewsWatcher could crash after you clicked OK. Fixed.

The forward delete key on the extended keyboard (del) no longer deletes the
previous character when you get to the end of a text field. It does nothing in
this case.

There were several errors with using the Delete key to delete selected text in
dialog text fields, including the text fields in the "Server Addresses"
preferences topic, the email address field in the "Personal Information"
preferences topic, and password fields in several dialogs. These errors are all
fixed.

NewsWatcher no longer hides the spinning beachball cursor if you press a key
during a long operation with the status window open.

NewsWatcher was not properly changing the cursor to the standard arrow when it
presented the print job dialog. Fixed.

If no printer is selected in the Chooser, or if the printer driver for the
currently selected printer is missing from the Extensions folder, NewsWatcher now
presents an English error message when you try to print rather than presenting an
"unexpected" error number.

If some other program sent NewsWatcher an Apple event which it did not
understand, NewsWatcher reported an "unexpected" error -1708. Fixed.

When you extract binaries, NewsWatcher writes a temporary file and then runs a
decode helper program (e.g., uuUndo or StuffIt Expander). If you dragged the
temporary file to the trash before NewsWatcher ran the helper program, you got a
bogus error message claiming that NewsWatcher could not find the helper program.
Fixed.