Ensisoft releases Newsflash Plus 3.3.1

[UseNetLover]

Hey envisoft, could your company develop a version of Mac Snow Leopard PLEASE? Thanks

[sassan]

Thank you for making this client, it's great.

But one thing I'm missing is grouping of the download, similar to alt.binz

Either way, thanks

[MultiForce]

Loving it so far. Tried a few others but always went back to Alt.Binz mostly because they had issues when downloading large collections.

ETA on files are nice but I would want to see ETA on the total., or at least on each release/"NZB".
Is it possible to get it to show all the files under the NZB name in the downloads window so you can show/hide the list of file names (like Alt.Binz)? It's a bit hard to see what release is finished etc.
ETA/speed on taskbar would be nice.

"Yield", "Clone", "Delete Connection" and "Flush" does what?

It doesn't seem to automatically sort after date or whatever when you refresh RSS, you have to click on date to get it to sort it (yeah I'm lazy).

A really dark theme would be nice (good old terminal green on black maybe)

[ensisoft]

Hi guys,

@UseNetLover - Yes I could develop a Mac version... except that I don't have a mac So no Mac version right now. Sorry.

@sassan - Thanks

@MultiForce - Thanks, that's a second request for grouping of the downloads into releases. I quite like this idea.. I have to chew on it for a while to figure out how to do it but yeah it's definitely doable.

"Yield", "Clone", "Delete Connection" and "Flush" does what?

These are probably a little bit unintuitive concepts for the users, which is bad desing on my behalf. It's just very difficult to translate concepts that are obvious to you for users. Anyway here's a quick recap:

Yield = Request the currently selected connection to be given a new download to work on. If there are downloads with higher priority they are considered before normal priority ones.
Clone = Create a new connection based on selected existing connection, basically "duplicate"
Delete connection = well... delete's a connection, removes a connection, disconnects a single connection. Don't know how to explain it
Flush = This is a bit bad and only involves headers. If you're downloading headers and you don't want to wait for the whole process to finish you can just "flush" them onto the disk. So you can start browsing while letting the process to continue.

Please, if you have suggestions how to formulate the concepts better on the UI I'm all ears. (And if everything else fails.. there's always the help file )

It doesn't seem to automatically sort after date or whatever when you refresh RSS, you have to click on date to get it to sort it (yeah I'm lazy).

Yep, this is an unimplemented feature. I'm lazy too

A really dark theme would be nice

Unfortunately the theme engines come preinstalled with the toolkit (Qt)... maybe in the future.

[zot]

Since I've destroyed a few hard drives downloading, a disk caching feature is something I welcome in a client. For instance, Unzbin has a simple MB memory-cache amount setting, and Usenet Explorer has an option to store and decode articles completely in memory and so only write out the finished rar file to disk.

Basically, anything to keep the hard drive from constantly thrashing as it downloads. (some of the older newsreaders and P2P clients would thrash drives even downloading at dialup speed, and so wear out hard disks with only a few GB downloaded, at least in my experience)


I would agree that Altbinz has a nice download page layout, with all the stats and groupings laid out in an easy-to-read manner.

For header layout, I liked the way that NewsReactor grouped its headers into rars and then grouped all rars in a release into a single title. Simple but effective.

[ensisoft]

Since I've destroyed a few hard drives downloading, a disk caching feature is something I welcome in a client. For instance, Unzbin has a simple MB memory-cache amount setting, and Usenet Explorer has an option to store and decode articles completely in memory and so only write out the finished rar file to disk.

Newsflash has a setting for setting max file size for in memory decoding. When a binary is decoded in memory all the data is kept in memory untill it's complete and is then written to disk in one go.

[zot]

Excellent. I guess I completely missed the "Treshold" setting

Will future versions come with an uninstaller? Does NewsFlash create any Windows registry keys or install files anywhere other than its installation directory?

Also, it's not a major issue for me, but it would be nice to be able to change the download order of files. (Sometimes a release contains files named in such a way that both CD1 and CD2 will get downloaded at the same time, instead of completing CD1 before starting CD2)

One more small point..... It seems that the number of connections remains constant across every server in Newsflash. It can take me 4x or 5x as many connections to max out my line using the UE server as it does the US server. If I'm using the free ISP usenet server, I'm only allowed 2 connections, and if I request more than that, the download will sometimes hang up and stall, saying that I've exceeded the connection limit. (this is why I always stop short of using the maximum number of allowable connections on any server: the server will punish me thinking I'm too greedy) Also, I've discovered that old files often need more server connections than recent material, for reasons I've never quite understood. My favorite feature of (old versions of) Grabit was the fact that I could change the number of connections on the fly, just by checking or unchecking a series of boxes on the front page -- and this feature I used quite often.

A possible easy workaround to Newsflash's connection issue might be to install several installations of Newsflash: one copy for connecting to the ISP server, one copy for the pay-server, etc. -- if Newsflash supports multiple installations.

That's all I can think of for now. NewsFlash is looking very good.

[ensisoft]

Excellent. I guess I completely missed the "Treshold" setting

Will future versions come with an uninstaller? Does NewsFlash create any Windows registry keys or install files anywhere other than its installation directory?

I hope I have the time and motivation to create a proper installer one day. So yeah, uninstaller is on the todo list. Just don't know when. And no, the application creates no registry entries whatsoever. In fact the readme.txt contains directions how to *completely* remove the application (just delete 2 folders). Sorry for the inconvenience.

Also, it's not a major issue for me, but it would be nice to be able to change the download order of files. (Sometimes a release contains files named in such a way that both CD1 and CD2 will get downloaded at the same time, instead of completing CD1 before starting CD2)

You should be able to do this... Downloads tab contains up/down/bottom/top buttons for moving selected tasks in the queue.

One more small point..... It seems that the number of connections remains constant across every server in Newsflash. It can take me 4x or 5x as many connections to max out my line using the UE server as it does the US server. If I'm using the free ISP usenet server, I'm only allowed 2 connections, and if I request more than that, the download will sometimes hang up and stall, saying that I've exceeded the connection limit. (this is why I always stop short of using the maximum number of allowable connections on any server: the server will punish me thinking I'm too greedy) Also, I've discovered that old files often need more server connections than recent material, for reasons I've never quite understood. My favorite feature of (old versions of) Grabit was the fact that I could change the number of connections on the fly, just by checking or unchecking a series of boxes on the front page -- and this feature I used quite often.

A possible easy workaround to Newsflash's connection issue might be to install several installations of Newsflash: one copy for connecting to the ISP server, one copy for the pay-server, etc. -- if Newsflash supports multiple installations.

That's all I can think of for now. NewsFlash is looking very good.

Yep, right now the maximum connections per server is a global setting, but I'm planning on moving this to be per server instead.

Right now however you can manually create/remove connections per each server on the Downloads tab. Simply select a connection and either Clone or Delete it. Cloning creates a new connection to the same server with the same properties (credentials/SSL etc) and Deleting removes a connection. HTH.

Thanks for the input.

[Cabalo]

I was just poking around on newsflash and knowing it's the work of only one coder, it's a pretty impressive software. What I like the most is being able to search through headers and manually update groups and search through their headers.
It makes me nostalgic. See, I started on newsgroups way before the NZB was invented, and it was always a nice feeling browsing through the groups and checking what's new.

Good job indeed, and please keep going.

[zot]

MAJOR BUG! - automatic deletion of paused or "incomplete" downloads

I hope this 'deletion bug' only applies to par files, which happened to be my case. I think the only situation in which software should ever be allowed to automatically delete downloaded files might be *optionally* upon successful par-repair and unrar of the finished files. (even if a download is properly judged as being "unrepairable" just means I need to download the missing parts from another source) I had just paused the download and I did not even complete the download and Newsflash deleted all the files that had already downloaded. (I will turn this thing off in the scripts page and do my own par checking and unraring - and suggest that other users consider also disabling those functions for now)



Are these logs written to a file? I couldn't find any log files, so I had to post a screenshot instead. I had several other suggestions to make, but for now I think this problem is of the highest priority.