Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!stanford.edu!neon.Stanford.EDU!pescadero.Stanford.EDU!philip
From: philip@pescadero.Stanford.EDU (Philip Machanick)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.comm
Subject: Re: TheNews version 2.02 available for FTP
Message-ID: <1991Jun6.174125.19834@neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 6 Jun 91 17:41:25 GMT
References: <1991Jun6.041416.21913@neon.Stanford.EDU> <3svha0-@rpi.edu>
Sender: news@neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System)
Reply-To: philip@pescadero.stanford.edu
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 48

In article <3svha0-@rpi.edu>, gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu (Garance A. Drosehn) writes:
|> Hmm.  Minutes?  For what?  I just started up TheNews using my news group file  
|> and it took 30-35 seconds for it to read the 1000-something line file and come  
|> up with the list of unread articles for the 15 newsgroups I actually follow  
|> thru it.  I then opened a newsgroup that had 298 unread messages, and it took  
|> TheNews about 23 seconds to list all the headers for all those unread messages  
|> (sorted, no less...).  Took about 3 seconds on a newsgroup with only 7 unread  
|> articles to list.  This is on a Mac IIci, your mileage may of course vary...

I tried to repeat your tests using XRN and The News. It took XRN 9s to launch
and list the groups with uread articles. I then opened a group with 489
unread articles. This took 7s.

I then tried to do the same with The News. I didn't count program launch
time, just the time to open the news file. This took 37s (using about 15
out of over 1400 groups on the server). Maybe not minutes, but significantly
slower. I then tried to open the group with 489 unread articles. I was offered
the option of only getting 200 because this might be slow. I decided to go for
all 489. After about a minute, The News lost contact with the server (one
of its less robust features - XRN will keep retrying until it makes contact
again). I had to quit and relaunch to get in touch with the server again.
I tried again, but this time asking for only 200 articles. This seemed to
work, but I didn't note the time. I tried the whole group again and
had an unrecoverable system error. After reboot, The News was damaged and
wouldn't launch again.

I assume this is at least in part because the program modifies its
own resources to save settings. Surely this is not recommended
practice.

|> Are you running system 6 or system 7?  I found TheNews to be the only Mac  
|> program I have which stumbled across the problem that the famed MMINIT  
|> addressed.
I'm running 7.0 on a cx (which as far as I know didn't need the MMINIT fix).

Bottom line: The News may work for you. If so, keep feeding suggestions
for improvements to the author, and post to the net whenever major
improvements appear. Right now, I can live with MacX and XRN, though I
would prefer a Mac application for a number of reasons.

Just in case anyone gets the wrong impression: I do like to encourage
shareware, and am even tolerant of bugs, as long as the software is a good
alternative to other options. For example, I do all my downloading
with XferIt 1.4, which appears to overlap de-binhexing with downloading -
very fast compared with everything else I've tried.
-- 
Philip Machanick
philip@pescadero.stanford.edu