Hogwasher

The last real WORKING usenet client,Hogwasher works, and works better than any other usenet reader on the Mac. After the petty childishness of thoth and the histrionics of Brian, ,most moved to Unison, written by Panic, which worked well as long as they continued support and develop the app. Unfortunately, Panic decided to kill off the program and told it's loyal purchasers of Unison to drop dead. I just stopped using usenet for a while, then tried Mimo from Giganews. Unbelievable. One of the best examples of why Java failed miserably as a programming environment. Slow beyond belief, mimo was as close to totally useless as you could get. Giganew is dropping customers by the thousands, perhaps they should consider a blanket site license for Hogwasher? Mimo is a pointless insult of an app. I truly pity anyone buying giganews for the first time and assuming Mimo is the 'standard' way of interacting with the usenet. ::shudder::

Latest version at 5.08: Fixed potential hang at the conclusion of retrieving new headers. Fixed hang displaying message window for message not in the currently shown subscription. Navigation in message window now enabled even when not in the current subscription. Updated message window toolbar icons. Subscription searches are no longer restored if the search term consists entirely of whitespace. Fixed UI glitch with progress indicator while retrieving headers. Fixed problem loading subscriptions containing very large number of newsgroups. Expansion state of threads is now preserved after retrieving new headers. Fixed parsing of date strings using non-English day of week abbreviations. Improved decoding of badly formatted UTF-8 quoted printable subject strings. Improved decoding of Asian charsets. Sorting messages by size now works correctly. New preference to always add nzb files to a user-specified folder. Fixed the incorrect wrapping of long lines of quoted text.

The only alternative to Unison?

I checked for update this morning and new version is currently at 5.04. Most important part of the update is big improvement in handling of large header downloads and overall app speed.

Hogwasher 5 is elegant and most usable for both binaries and text. I've been a long time Thoth (text) and Unison (binaries) user, but as these are moribund, it is a delight to see Hogwasher's re-write. Keyboard navigation is actually quite good if you change the way tab moves focus to text boxes and lists only in sys prefs, keyboard shortcuts. Hogwasher's UTF-8 performance is the best I have seen. I hit a couple of crashes while dining on the free trial. Asar's support was prompt and to the point.

I wanted to like the update… I really wanted to. Unfortunately, the app is still pretty buggy (rules are highly dysfunctional for instance) and downloading headers for groups is at least 4 times slower than other apps. Using the app only with the keyboard is impossible since the focus of the window changes for no good reason, etc… Considering that version 4 also had nasty issues acknowledged by the authors, yet never fixed, I have very little hope that the issues in the new version will be corrected any time soon. In addition, there is no upgrade price on the website. I doubt I'll fall for a license for the new version any time soon :-(

This is a solid upgrade and thankfully there's now once again a supported Usenet reader for the mac. It's fast, efficient and is everything you'd want in a usenet reader. And for the old-school geeks there's even X-Face support now.. Nice work ASAR.

Hogwasher 5 has been released! For 10.9 and higher, with binary support both up and down. So Usenet lives on on Mac!