Reading the news

Wednesday, February 25, 2004 11:28 AM

So, I finally switched to XanaNews as my newsreader for the Delphi newsgroups. I have to say, Colin has done a great job. As a TeamB member, I spend a lot of time in these newsgroups, so switching from Agent wasn't easy. Still, XanaNews made the transition fairly painless.

The great thing about XanaNews, for me, is that Colin really figured out what are the things that interest heavy newsgroup readers, then made them easy. XanaNews highlights groups and threads that require my attention (for example, because someone replied to my post). It lets me go back to the previously viewed message, which is incredibly useful when you're reading hundreds of posts per day. Sometimes you're just going through unread messages, trying to find something interesting, when you realized the post you've clicked through could be just that, only it's buried in a huge thread somewhere. One or two clicks on the Back button, and I'm there. Also interesting are the special tools, like Forensic Mode. Viewing messages in forensic mode can be quite educational, even surprising.

My only problem so far is that XanaNews can be slow at times. It actually downloads messages a lot faster than Agent, but there's a slight delay when moving between groups. Still, it's a minor inconvenience compared with all of the great features.