WinVN Enhancements
Brian C. Wiles
features, such as decoding multipart files, it had a lot of stability
problems. So, I took it upon myself to revamp a lot of WinVN's internal
workings as well as add some new features.
Has anyone heard whether or not anyone is still developing the main
WinVN application? It has been quite a while ago that 99.9 was released.
If not, I would like to post my version on my web site and incorporate
other's changes as well. I'm sure I'm not the only one that has modified
WinVN.
Some of the modifications I have made are listed below:
<bigger> Added Save Article List option.
Added transfer speed indicator to coding status box.
Added option to not sort article headers because it is really
slow if it can't hold the entire list in RAM and has to swap
out to disk.
Added article sort percentage indicator.
Added total & current article count in title bar while
retrieving article headers.
Added search by author when searching for article.
Changed to ignore sequence numbers greater than 1000, since
you'd sit there and select all billion pieces of a file, only
to discover part 765 is missing. :) This increased the
accuracy of figuring out how many parts were really in a file.
Added code that will just skip an article if it's a bad article
number (expired), instead of aborting the rest of the articles.
Fixed an old bug in original WinVN 99.8, where the decoding
status window was not destroyed if the decode was aborted due
to a bad article number.
Made decoding status window update "x to go" as you select or
deselect articles as well.
Added 2 progress bars to decoding status window. One is for
the current article, and the other is for all selected
articles.
Added sliding icon to About dialog box.
Added total lines to decoding status window.
Allows spaces in file names for UUEncoded files.
Added reconnect feature if server disconnects.
File sequence numbers now appear to be correct. Used to look
for first "x of x" or "x/x", but now looks for last one in
title, so it will correctly parse "disk x of x fileX.zip
(x/x)".
</bigger> If you have made any changes to WinVN, feel free to email me,
and I'll incorporate them into my version, and we'll make WinVN the best
news reader around. I think you'll be impressed with the changes I've
made. First, I want to give the original WinVN developers a chance to
use my changes before I diverge and maintain a separate version.
-BCW
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Brian C. Wiles
Robert Kirk
>
> I have used WinVN for a couple of years now, and while it has some nice
>features, such as decoding multipart files, it had a lot of stability
>problems. So, I took it upon myself to revamp a lot of WinVN's internal
>workings as well as add some new features.
>
Brian... Thanks for your effort. I think the original authors would
welcome your help. I like WINVN and am not particularly upset with
the slowdown in updates since it does what I want it to do. But
there are always inmprovements to be made and yours sound worthwhile.
(One nice thing would be to be able to abort a retreival in progerss
without having to kill the program itself.)
The nice thing the authors have done is tpo make it open so folks
like you can contribute; and the place for the updates should be at
the website if the authors approve.
Bob Kirk