Antipdoean NEWSie

David Leaver

The net is about communication and gathering information. NEWSie tries to 
combine several ways of doing this is one package. How does it work long 
distance?

It's said that you need a lathe to build a lathe. What do you do with a 
lathe when you've got one?  If the model engineering magazines are to be 
believed, lathe owners spend a good percentage of their time building 
gadgets for their lathes.

The internet is a bit like that. One almost need to be connected to get 
hold of the software, and having achieved connection, one spends a lot of 
time downloading more internet software. But we all have to start 
somewhere.

My bootstrap was the WWW130 package which I ordered about two years ago 
now from FaST Club. When the disk arrived I read the documentation and 
went out and bought myself a modem and an internet service provider, and 
assumed that all would be well. Ha!

Since this is about my personal experiences I had better describe my 
equipment. I started with a Mega STe with 4Mb memory, TOS 2.05, NVDI 4.11, 
a 50Mb internal hard drive, an external SupraDrive FD-10 which uses 10Mb 
floppies, a 28.8k modem a SM124 mono monitor and SC1435 colour monitor. As 
a result of the seductive powers of the internet I have since added a 
Syquest ezFlyer, a video card a 17" colour monitor, MagiC and, most 
recently, a TT.

I started out with STiK and SLIP using the ISP of Steve Adams', the 
original author of STiK. Sadly that ISP has now ceased supporting SLIP and 
I am using STinG and PPP.

The WWW package included STiK, AntMail, CAB v 1.3, MG-FTP, a Telnet 
program and a few other bits and pieces. Of the clients the only one that 
was worth a cracker was AntMail, although to be fair to CAB, that it would 
not work at all was due to a problem with Pure Pascal (see AC#7 p55). 
Although, or perhaps because, AntMail is a basic package, it has proved to 
be very reliable.

I have experienced many difficulties and problems over the last two years 
with STiK, STinG and the various clients. The one conclusion that I have 
been able to draw reliably is that many problems are specific to a 
particular ISP.  I was offered much help and advice by the always friendly 
Atari community but only a small percentage of it proved to be useful, not 
because the advice was wrong but because the problem to which it applied 
was not quite my problem. A particular feature, if that is the word, of 
problems with net software is that the hierarchy of packages makes it 
difficult to determine where a fault lies.

I cannot recall the first version of NEWSie that I started using but it 
was at least as early as v 0.64. I love the precision of the version 
numbers in our net packages - particularly Dan Ackerman's four decimal 
places in CAB overlay for STiK and STinG. The following comments apply to 
version 0.86 of NEWSie.

NEWSie was an important development. It provided a Usenet client and an 
email client in a single package for STiK users. As it has developed, it 
has acquired an ftp client and a general URL client which is slowly 
gaining a web browsing ability. Early versions had many bugs, most of 
which have been fixed and will not concern me here, but a few still remain 
and some new ones have appeared. Also some of the features are susceptible 
to improvement.

The email client has virtues and vices. One advantage it offers over 
AntMail lies in the organisation of messages as single files with index 
files, called mailboxes, whereas AntMail's in-box is one large file with 
an index file - time consuming for deleting or extracting messages. 
However NEWSie's file handling is not completely reliable and it pays to 
compare the mail-box with what's on the disk every now and then. A lost 
file finding mailbox utility is provided to assist in this.

The file handling problem also applies to Usenet, which uses a 'mailbox' 
for each news group. Cleaning up there must be manual.

NEWSie provides an address book with nicknames and lists of addressees and 
supports UUE and MIME coding of attachments. All these function 
satisfactorily.

NEWSie's mail dowmloading facilities are primitive, even compared with 
those in AntMail. There is no provision for getting selected messages, or 
for deleting messages left on the server. This probably explains the 
appearance of ancilliary mail handling utilities such as POPWATCH.

There is a strange bug in NEWSie's in-built viewer which affects me under 
TOS but not under MagiC. If I scroll a window several times a line at a 
time, NEWSie will lock up. It appears to go into some form of loop.

When printing a message, NEWSie assumes a US letter page which is a pain 
with a A4 printer as it throws an extra sheet with a couple of lines on 
it. It is much better to print from an external viewer - I use Everest, 
which is also my drafting tool for Usenet and email.

The news handling client is powerful and flexible. I subscribe to a few 
groups, mainly Atari and railway modelling related which I download for 
off-line reading. There is a strange problem which I suffer in this. A 
small subset of messages halts the downloading process. The message is 
fetched, but NEWSie seems unable to sign off. If I press [Escape] the 
downloading jumps to the next news group.

When replying to a Usenet posting NEWSie occasionally has difficulty 
picking up the correct author of the previous message, sometimes with 
rather odd results. I have seen words on the Usenet attributed to me on 
subjects on which I have never ventured an opinion.

I have found NEWSie's ftp and general URL capability to be normally most 
reliable. On occasion things go haywire and I get CRC errors everywhere. 
However it is not obvious that the blame for this can be laid at NEWsie's 
door. The URL facility has developed into a basic but useful text-only 
browser. It is by no means a competitor for CAB, yet, but there do seem to 
be situations in which NEWSie has less trouble accessing a file than does 
the CAB/CAB-OVL combination.

NEWSie is still a relatively new product, developing rapidly, and John 
Rojewski should be highly commended for what he has achieved so far. He 
has been very responsive to requests from his users and the development of 
NEWSie is being driven in part by those users. It is not clear where this 
will lead. There is much that can be doen to improve and enhance the core 
Usenet and e-mail facilities. The program has been steadily growing in 
size, but if John aspires to make it a full-blown, most things in one 
package, net accessing package including a graphical web browser, it will 
clearly grow much larger than it is now. How big an Atari will be needed 
to run it then?

I made a few criticisms of the program, but NEWSie is a wonder and I would 
not be without it.