Welcome to Mystic News Reader, or mNews for short. For those of you
who came from the Amiga world, the name mNews may seem a bit familiar. Yep, I wrote that too.
Granted, it isn't the best application out there, neither is this, but I try. On the Amiga,
this is known as MUI News Reader, where the MUI is Magic User Interface, which is copyrighted by Stefan
Stuntz and here is the copyright notice.
Anyways, I felt like keeping the mNews name, so I had to come up with a new word for the 'm'; mystic just happened to be one of the first words that came into my head. On the Amiga, the code is written in C, here on BeOS, it is written in C++. It is not a port as many are done (hacking code to get it to comple); instead, I've taken what I did on the Amiga, and completely re-wrote it in BeOS style. There is some Amiga code left, I mean, why completely re-write the interfaces to the news server? It doesn't care who's talking to it. Enough waffle (as my wife says), here are the docs.
Please keep in mind this is a very early release. Many bugs and shortcommings will be identified throughout this document. Please feel free to send me bug reports via e-mail. Thank you for your patience.
mNews is designed to be a easy to use, easy to configure, and hopefully fast usenet news group utility. It has been built with the capability to have multiple socket connections in hopes of a speed increase. In the future, there are hopes of multiple, simultaneous server connections. As of right now, it only supports news group servers that have 'INN' extensions. These extensions allow a faster access to the article headers. You will not go far if they are not supported by your ISP. Most all news servers now support INN.