• MacSOUP would crash when trying to import articles with certain illegal “Date:” headers. Fixed.
• When you selected “Purge selected groups” and then changed the selection while the command was processing, MacSOUP would purge the newly selected groups rather than stick to the groups that were initially selected. Fixed.
2.2
• The “Newsgroup Settings” or “Mailbox Settings” command used to be available only when the main window was in front. It is now also available when a newsgroup or mailbox is open and the subject window or message window is in front.
• The “Rewrap Text” command is now also available in the message window; this may be useful with certain badly wrapped articles that would otherwise be hard to read. This is only a temporary modification while the message is displayed; if you close and reopen the message, it reverts back to its original form. (Note that there’s no Undo for this command.)
• Supports “Smart Scroll” by Marc Moini. When Smart Scroll is installed, the “Proportional Scrollbars” option in MacSOUP’s Settings dialog has no effect; scrollbars are then always drawn proportional by Smart Scroll. The benefit you get from installing Smart Scroll is proportional scrollbars in (almost) all other applications too, “Live Scrolling”, and the proper Copland look when Aaron or Kaleidoscope is installed. For more information about Smart Scroll, see Marc Moini’s page at
<http://www.kagi.com/authors/marc/>
• In the message window, shift-space scrolls back one page.
• Fixed a cosmetical problem with text hiliting in header fields in the message window.
• Several minor cosmetical fixes.
2.2b7
• MacSOUP now doesn’t send outgoing messages that are open. When you close the settings file (or quit the program) and there are some open messages, MacSOUP will suspend them.
• New options in the Settings dialog (under Miscellaneous):
- you can specify whether the settings of the “Show” and “Sort by” popup menus are remembered separately for each newsgroup/mailbox, or whether it’s a global setting for all newsgroups/mailboxes
- default tab width for outgoing messages
- a new “Warnings” page that lets you turn on confirmation alerts for certain operations
• The Connect to Server dialog would sometimes come up with a white background instead of gray. Fixed.
• When fetching news, the database files are updated more often. This is a bit slower but safer; if your Mac crashes while MacSOUP is downloading, you won’t lose as much data.
• The “All Groups” and “New Groups” windows didn’t have proportional scroll bars. Fixed.
• The subject list would sometimes be scrolled unnecessarily after doing an Auto-Tag or Auto-Kill. Fixed. (It is still scrolled when the Show popup menu is set to Unread and you do an Auto-Kill. This one is harder to fix...)
• MacSOUP still wouldn’t allow you to post to a newsgroup whose name doesn’t contain a period (such as “general”). See 2.2b6 below. Fixed.
2.2b6
• Fixed a stupid bug that crept in with 2.2b4: with certain news servers, MacSOUP would download only half of the available articles (it would skip every other article). Fixed.
• Fixed a bug in the AppleScript code. When telling MacSOUP to fetch news, it would sometimes fetch tagged headers instead, or vice versa, or both. Fixed.
• Some of the menu commands slightly change their meaning when you press the option key. Just pull down the menus and then hold down option to see what happens. In particular,
- “Paste” changes to “Paste as Quotation” (this used to be a separate command)
- “Tag” changes to “Tag All” (option-command-T)
- “Untag” changes to “Untag All” (option-command-U)
- “Purge Old Articles” changes to “Purge Selected Groups” (option-command-Y)
- “Connect to Server…” changes to “Connect to Server” (option-command-K). Note that the “…” is missing, which means that it won’t put up a dialog (it will use last time’s settings)
• Some more keyboard shortcuts have been added:
- option-command-F for “Forward”
- shift-command-L for “Lock”
- shift-command-U for “Unlock”
• The keyboard shortcuts for the items in the “Sort by” popup menu are now displayed in the menu.
• Your own articles are still auto-tagged automatically; however, they aren’t tagged themselves any more, because you’ll normally know what you wrote. If you want the previous behaviour back, create a kill file entry in the <All Groups> collection that tags if “From:” contains your address.
• MacSOUP wouldn’t allow you to manually add a newsgroup whose name consists of only one component, i.e. whose name doesn’t contain a period (such as “general”). Fixed.
2.2b5
Fixes two major bugs that were introduced in 2.2b4:
• After creating a new mailbox, MacSOUP would report a -43 error when you tried to open that mailbox, and it wouldn’t let you open the settings file from then on.
• Ater creating a new newsgroup, MacSOUP would crash with an internal error when you tried to open it.
2.2b4
Important change:
The behaviour of the subject window has changed. In previous versions, “selecting” a message meant marking it with a black dot, and most of the menu commands such as Delete or Mark As Read etc applied to these messages, not to the hilited message. This was not intuitive and not Mac-like.
Marking a message with a black dot is now called “tagging” it. The only purpose of tagging a message is to mark it for reading, i.e. pressing space opens the next tagged message. “Selecting” a message now means hiliting it, as in every other Mac application. You can shift-click or command-click to select multiple messages. All menu commands now apply to the selected messages, not to the tagged ones. This also finally allows you to delete individual headers.
If you do want to apply a command to all tagged messages, e.g. after a Find command, you can press Tab to select (hilite) the tagged messages.
Some commands have been renamed because of this change; for example, Auto-Select is now called Auto-Tag.
The “Deselect All” command has been removed, as it doesn’t make much sense any more. To untag all message, type Cmd-A Cmd-U (select all, untag).
The keyboard shortcut of the Rewrap Text command has been changed to Cmd-R. Cmd-T is now used for the Tag command. I hope this change doesn’t cause too much confusion.
New features/enhancements
• AppleScript support. You can now write an AppleScript to tell MacSOUP to fetch news or mail, and to purge old articles.
• For mailboxes you can now choose to show only received messages, only sent messages, or both, in the same way as you choose to show only headers, only bodies, or both in newsgroups. The current setting is displayed below the “Show” popup menu.
• You can now tell MacSOUP whether or not you want it to save copies of your outgoing messages, and to which mailbox (seperately for news and mail). For mail you can also tell it to save the messages to the mailbox in which they belong according to the mail filters, rather than to a particular mailbox (this is the behaviour of previous versions).
• The “Warn when there are more than [X] articles” option in the Connect to Server dialog is gone. Instead, you can now set a limit separately for each newsgroup, and you can also specify if you want to be warned or if you want MacSOUP to silently fetch the first or last so many articles. See the manual chapter about the Newsgroup Settings dialog for details. (For those who prefer a global setting: just choose Select All before you open the Newsgroup Settings dialog to change the setting for all groups at once.)
• A new option to disable the graphical thread display for selected groups. This may be useful for groups where only announcements are posted and no real discussion takes place.
• The graphical thread display has been improved to show more information. It shows which articles are locked (option-click to lock or unlock an article), and which articles are header-only (click to tag a header for downloading). Your own articles are displayed in blue. And it shows the authors of other articles in the thread as you move the mouse over them. See the manual chapter about the Message Window for details.
• More keyboard navigation in the thread display: you can move up and down, left and right, and even diagonally by using the number keys on the keypad.
• If you select an email address (or a full name/address combination such as “Stefan Kurth <stk@kagi.com>”) in a message window and then choose “New Message,” MacSOUP puts this address into the To header of the new message.
• The settings of the “Show” and “Sort by” popup menus are now remembered separately for each newsgroup and mailbox. Let me know if you dislike this change; I might make it optional.
• When you create a new message, you can now decide to post it to a group, send it via email, or both. In previous versions this was only possible if your message was a reply to another news article.
• A new “Insert Spoiler Character” command in the Edit menu.
• The manual now has an index. Press the space bar to show it.
• There’s a new manual chapter about basic newsreading operations. Please read it.
Bug fixes
• Using Eudora as a helper for email replies would not work correctly with the French version of Eudora. Fixed.
• Using Emailer as a helper for email replies would not work at all. Fixed.
• When you started a new message by using the “New Mail Message to ->” submenu and then appended more addresses to the To: header field, the message would only be sent to the first address. Fixed.
• In some rare cases MacSOUP would sent an incorrect password to the POP server. Fixed.
• On PowerBooks, when doing a very long purge operation (longer than 15 seconds or so), MacSOUP would slow down to a crawl until you moved the mouse. Fixed (I hope).
• Your signature wasn’t added when you forwarded a message. Fixed.
• Lots of other bugs fixed.
2.2b3
• The “bug fix” that was supposed to fix the database corruption bug mentioned below (the first item under 2.2b2) actually did more harm than good. It introduced a new bug that would cause MacSOUP to crash or hang when importing a news article that references itself. Fixed. Again I recommend to delete all your .index files, as mentioned under 2.2b2. Sorry for the inconvenience.
• When you had set the purging options to auto-purge when opening the settings file, and you clicked the stop button while MacSOUP was purging, it would crash with a type 1 error. Fixed.
• When you have specified Eudora or Claris Emailer as a helper for email replies, MacSOUP no longer appends the signature to your replies, since this should be done by Eudora or Emailer.
2.2b2
• Fixed a bug that could corrupt your database (more or less severely) in certain situations. Since everyone is likely to have been affected by this bug (even if you haven’t had any problems so far), I recommend to delete all .index files from your “Incoming News” folder before running this new version. This will cause MacSOUP to rebuild the index files. Unfortunately you will lose all auto-select, auto-kill, and lock marks this way; sorry for this.
• When you copied a news article to a mailbox and wrote a followup to this copy (instead of the original article), the followup wouldn’t have a References: header. Fixed.
• Fixed a bug (introduced in 2.2b1) that would often cause a crash when creating a new kill file collection.
• In the subject window for mailboxes, the Lock and Unlock menu items were erroneously enabled. Fixed.
• The manual finally contains the previously missing chapter about regular expressions. Also, you may want to read the new chapter about the Newsgroup Settings dialog; it’s important when you change the settings of several groups at once.
2.2b1
• A new “Forward” command to pass mail messages or news articles on to someone else.
• When you reply to a message and there’s some text selected, MacSOUP now only quotes the selected text. If nothing is selected, MacSOUP includes the entire message, as before.
• Now supports Claris Emailer (in addition to Eudora) as a helper application for email replies.
• MacSOUP now purges old articles according to the article’s Date: header rather than the date when the article was imported.
• New options to automatically purge all groups each time the settings file is opened, or before a SOUP packet is imported.
• Normally MacSOUP never purges unread articles. This has led to some confusion, so now there’s a new option to allow unread articles to be purged, for those who don’t like pressing Cmd-E.
• You can lock interesting articles so as to prevent them from being purged. The “Show” popup menu has a new option to show only the locked articles. Unfortunately this has caused the last three options in this menu to shift down by one, so their keyboard shortcuts are now ‘7’ through ‘9’ instead of ‘6’ through ‘8’. Sorry for this, I hope you’ll quickly get used to it.
• New option to disable the warning alert that comes up when you delete messages.
• You can now send mail to local addresses (such as “stk”). This also allows you to send mail to uqwk again.
• You can now shift-click or command-click to select multiple rows in all list windows (expept the subject window). This allows you for example to delete several kill file entries at once, to subscribe to a bunch of groups by dragging all of them from the list of all groups to the main window, and in particular it allows you to change the settings of several newsgroups at once.
• The Find command can now be used in the list of all groups. For this reason it has been moved from the Message menu to the Edit menu.
• After connecting to the server, MacSOUP can optionally play a sound and/or run an AppleScript. This can be used to run a script that closes your PPP connection.
• Importing headers used to be a two-step process: first it would download the headers from the server, and then it would import them in a second step while the modem was idle, wasting online time. Now this is done in one step (headers are imported immediately while they are downloaded), keeping the modem busy all the time.
• The setting of the “Show” popup menu is remembered seperately for newsgroups and mailboxes.
• Kill File entries for the Lines: header didn’t work when fetching only headers. Fixed.
2.1
• Now supports news authentication. If your news server requires authentication, enter your news username and password in Internet Config. Most news servers don’t require authentication, so normally you should leave these fields empty.
• Now works with (misconfigured) news servers that require “MODE READER” to be sent as the first NNTP command.
• A “Mark as Read” command. I don’t know what it’s good for, but a lot of people have asked for it.
• A “Purge Old Articles” command (will purge articles from all newsgroups, according to each group’s settings), and an option to disable automatic purging (under Settings/Miscellaneous).
• On certain system configurations MacSOUP would crash while connecting to the server (mostly when closing the connection). Fixed.
• In certain circumstances MacSOUP would crash when attempting to display a news article that is cross-posted to more than five groups. Fixed.
• In some cases MacSOUP would sent an incorrect password to the POP server. In particular, this affected all passwords that start with a lowercase “v” (and a couple others). Fixed.
• When changing the name of a mailbox, the sub-menu of the “Move Message to” command didn’t immediately reflect the change. Fixed.
• When choosing “Followup” for a news article that has been copied to a mailbox, MacSOUP would report an internal error. Pressing “F” wouldn’t do anything at all. Fixed.
• If you use a utility such as Aurora to change the background color of all windows (system-wide), MacSOUP wouldn’t respect this and always paint its windows white instead. Fixed.
• For newsgroups that are configured to fetch only headers, MacSOUP now fetches new headers first, and then it downloads marked headers. This means that headers that are automatically selected by a kill file entry are immediately downloaded in the same session (but only if “Fetch marked headers” is checked).
• If a marked header can’t be downloaded because the article has already expired on the server, or it has been canceled meanwhile, MacSOUP now deselects the header. In previous versions it would stay selected, causing MacSOUP to try to download it again and again until you manually deselected it.
• Added a warning when you attempt to send an empty message, or a message that consists only of quoted text.
