Just when you thought Usenet was dead, or that it’s that place you go to read people yell at eachother, or it’s that site you search when your hardware goes wonky, Panic Inc. (creators of Trasmit and Audion) released a brand new product called Unison. Unison is a news reader that seems to have been influenced by Apple’s iApps.

Update 3 Feb 2004: As promised, I’ve incorporated my additions to this review having had a few more days to try out some things, and, boy, are my arms tired.

Instead of a traditional tree or list view to navigate to different groups, Unison uses a column view similar to the Apple Finder. The group and message lists sport a search field in their toolbars that behave like the Finder, Mail, or iTunes.

Update: Another really neat feature of the column layout when using the “All Groups” view is you can just start typing the name of your news group, and the selection jumps to the heading/sub-heading with the closest match. Even typing period (.), moves the selection to the next column over, and pressing Return/Enter will open the group in its own window. Pretty slick if you’re accustomed to typing your newsgroup in full.

You can also use the “Go to Group” (Cmd-K) feature which is kind of like the “Go to Folder” feature in the Finder, or like the address bar in a Web browser. In fact, it’s because it’s so similar to a Web browser address bar that auto-completes, that this feature has a lot of problems. For example, you type ‘alt.music.t’, it auto-completes part of the name, and you hit the down arrow because you can’t remember if the name you want is ‘tmbg’ or ‘t-m-b-g’. The problem is you’re presented with the entire list of groups, not just the music ones beginning with ‘T.’ Needless to say, that defeats the purpose, as you need to know the name you’re looking for ahead of time.

Much like other modern newsreaders, Unison supports in-line images of the GIF, JPEG, and PNG varienty, and supports yEnc decoding as well as the other standards. Their image thumbnails view is quite slick, borrowing some ideas from iPhoto.

Other newsreaders have file grouping in that individual chunks of a binary file are “merged” together to make it easier to download the whole file. Unison is , I think, the first to offer a second level of grouping where these “merged” files are then grouped into a collection that they call a File Group. This makes their File Viewer much easier to navigate. I’ve had mixed results with it, but chalk that up to posters using all sorts of different naming conventions. Panic has done a pretty decent job trying to take as many of these naming conventions as possible into account.

When you click on View to see the contents of a message, a new window opens up. Images are displayed in a shrink-to-fit-width style. Resizing the window will grow or shrink the image and reflow the text, so you never have a horizontal scroll bar. Thumbs up on that feature.

Another of Unison’s features is MP3 streaming. In other words, instead of downloading an entire MP3 and then listening to it to see if you want it, you can start playing it as soon as Unison has downloaded part of it. I haven’t tested this out, so I don’t know how well it works.

Update: I’ve now spent some time looking at and testing this feature specifically, and am officially giving it the title of “F**king Cool!” The idea isn’t exactly new, as you’ve always been able to listen to the start of an MP3 before it’s completely downloaded (due to the nature of how MP3s are constructed), but to incorporate it the way Panic has is genius.

An extension of this I’d like to see, is a way to cache info about the file once you’ve begun streaming it. In other words, have a few extra columns to show Mono vs. Stereo, Bit Rate, Sample Rate, Running Length, etc… All of this should be possible to retrieve once you’ve started to grab some frames of the MP3. Maybe even have a button-accessible pop-up that shows the ID3 info that you can edit and have stored in the file once it’s been downloaded (or just have it read-only for informational purposes if it’s too hard/complicated). All this could be tricky with VBR files, but for those you could display bit rate as a running average or something.

One glitch I noticed with this is that the progress bar that shows up when you begin playing a file, presumably shows the download progress. However, as long as the file continues to play, the progress bar will only get as far as about 97 percent even if the file is completely downloaded. Presumably this extra 3 percent or so is reserved for when the file is finished playing. Also, each time you play the same file, it redownloads regardless of whether is has a fully cached copied or not. Also, it doesn’t overwrite the old file, it renames the new file with a ‘.1′, ‘.2′, ‘.3′, etc… added on which could litter your cache folder if you’re not careful. Wouldn’t it be simpler to just reuse the file that was already downloaded (assuming it was a fully downloaded file)?

That actually raises another question. I don’t know a whole lot about the NNTP protocol, but is it possible to implement resumable downloads? I imagine it wouldn’t be any easy solution given the volatility of some newsgroups/servers.

Also, presumably when a fully cached file is selected for download, Unison is supposed to copy the cached file out of the cache folder directly into the download folder to save having to download it from the news server, am I right? When I do that, I get an error under the file’s progress bar in the Downloads window that it couldn’t open file at “/my/download/folder/news.group.name/filename.foo/filename.foo” (that’s not a spelling error; I wrote filename.foo twice). Unison doesn’t stop there, however. It proceeds to delete the completed file in my cache for good, and restarts the download for the file from the server, this time saving it to my download folder. Some logic is screwed up somewhere on that one. Also, if you’re selecting it for download with some others files you haven’t yet downloaded in any way, shape, or form, do you really need to queue the ones that are already completely downloaded in the cache folder? Can’t you just go ahead and copy those ones over?

I’ve noticed a couple other things related to downloading. Can I get an explanation of “Create folders for item groups?” Either I don’t know how that option is supposed to work or it’s just plain broken. Checked or unchecked, it had no bearing on the file structure of my download folder when files were downloaded.

Check-marks are placed at the left of a row for each file that has been fully downloaded. Down-arrows represent queued files. Down-arrows are also placed on the left of the file group’s icon to show that files in its group are currently queued. Once all the files in a group are downloaded, there is no indication next to a file group that all of its files have been downloaded, once the file group has been collapsed.

I like that info is shown on the dock icon when downloads are in progress, but I think they could stand to be a little more informative. Currently, it shows the # of Active downloads and the # of Queued downloads. Well, as long as there are queued downloads, the # of active downloads is always going to be constant, making it pretty unnecessary for the near entire duration of the download process. Maybe have an option to show a mini progress bar, or a percentage, or an estimated time remaining, or some combination thereof. You already know the file sizes involved, should just be a simple bit of math to get the percentage.

Another thing. Unison is fast! Of course, getting an initial group of messages for the first time takes a while, but that’s the nature of Usenet. Retrieved messages download in a flash with my cable modem, even when compared against other readers on the same machine. And searching is nearly instantaneous, even for very large groups of messages. Unison seems to keep a cache of the message headers, so quitting and returning to the same newsgroup at a later time is quite expedient.

Update: Is it possible to show the list of messages as they are being downloaded from the server? Xnews can do this and it allows someone to see the types of messages in a group, allowing them to cancel loading a group if, for instance, roughly 90% of the messages loaded so far all seem to be spam.

However, there are a few minor annoyances I have with Unison, but they’re more about usability than actual bugs. Clicking View is nice, but a new window opens every time, and at some predetermined size and position. I would much rather have Unison reuse the View window I already have open, especially if I’ve got my windows laid out exactly where I want them. Plus, it reduces clutter.

Update: I’ve discovered a little more about this. You can save the dimensions of the view window once you’ve closed it. Each successive time the view window is opened, it’s at the same dimensions as the last time the view window was closed. I was expecting it to be more like Safari’s behaviour where the dimensions are saved whenever the window is resized (which, to me, seems to make a lot more sense). Having to close the window to save the dimensions goes against my concept of having only a single view window at all times. If I can’t have a single view window, at least have all new view windows open with the position and size I set the last view window at, not the same size and position of the last view window I didn’t want open anymore.

And another thing about view windows. As I move from message to message using the Previous and Next buttons, highlight the currently viewed message in the message list. Don’t have it stuck at the message I first viewed to bring the window up. And if I click the Next button several times in rapid succession, it still tries to load the intermediary messages instead of just skipping them which is obviously what I want. It’s even worse when those messages have images or something in them. Do this back and forth with the Next and previous buttons in rapid succession, and it really seems to screw up the caching scheme that’s in place.

I’d like a little more flexibility with the interface. I haven’t yet discovered a way to turn off the preview pane. I’m hoping it’s something simple that I’ve overlooked, but as it is right now I’ve just moved the separator to the bottom of the window. The only problem with that is clicking on a message still loads it into the preview pane, so there’s a slight pause when selecting messages.

Also, I’d like it if the image viewer could be viewed in a list, with the thumbnail or the left and the filename/subject line on the right. This way, you could still have small thumbnails but see the filename/subject without it being truncated.

Lastly, when you download a file. It puts it in a download location you specifiy in the preferences. This is great if you prefer to organize your files that way. Another option I’d like the download preferences to have is an “Ask Each Time” selection where a save dialog pops up asking where you’d like the file(s) to be saved each time you initiate a download process (i.e. NOT for each individual file, but for the current set of selected files). Also, a drag and drop from the different views should save the file(s) to the place where you dragged them.

Update: Now some ideas for the power users. Multi-level quote colouring ala Google groups or any modern email application. Borrow filters from Xnews that lets you modify a message’s foreground and background colour in the message list (imagine Mail.app’s filters), or have filters that have messages pulled out of the normal sort order and placed at the top of the list (i.e. “sticky” posts on forums). “Thread marking” like Omniweb’s page marking where you have a different set of next and previous commands that only cycle through a preset list of marked messages (like setting favourites on a TV remote). Borrow the idea of arbitrary scores from Xnews, but do them one better. Have all these scores and marks saved between sessions when you quit and reopen Unison.

All in all, I’m pretty impressed with it. I don’t use newsreaders very much, but when I have in the past I’ve used MT-NewsWatcher on my Mac or Xnews on Windows. I’m pretty tempted to switch, and I’ll continue to test it during my trial period, but I’m not sure if it’s got quite enough of the features I need for Unison to sway me in its direction. I’m definitely going to keep a close eye on its development, though. That’s for sure.

Update: That MP3 streaming feature nearly has me sold. Given the subject matter of my updates, it isn’t until you start to use the program more that some of it’s short comings start to become apparent. It’s evident my additions drive home the fact that Unison is at version 1.0, so I can cut them some slack for this being the first full public release.

Once these glitches are fixed, and you get the option to save files anywhere without having to go into the preferences each time, Unison is going to be quite a contender, if not the champion. I wouldn’t have spent all this time and effort writing this review if I didn’t think Panic has a damn good shot.