Unison is a new Mac OS X Usenet reader by Panic Software, the same people who produced the Transmit FTP client. It’s probably the slickest Usenet client I’ve used in a while, though being a 1.0 level product it has some features that are missing.
h4. Image Browsing
The best feature in Panic is by far it’s iPhoto style view of newsgroups allowing you to view thumbnails of any pictures, and browse visually through the group’s files. There’s something inherently faster (for me at least) about scanning a bunch of thumbnails than deciphering some badly named descriptions. You’ll clearly see the view if you look at this screenshot:
h4. File Downloading
Unison also does a pretty good job of sorting out split and encoded attachments and bundling them together. It can decode most of the files, and then pass them onto compression software for extracting. Pretty good, though the alternate views seem to have more trouble dealing with read/unread threads than the normal views.
h4. User Interface
While I’ve used other programs like Thoth and MT-NewsWatcher, they really don’t feel comfortable in OS X. OS X seems to be moving towards reducing the number of windows used by applications and concentrating functionality into a main program window with drawers, panes, tabs, etc. to segregate different views (similar to the approach windows has taken, we’ll see if Expose encourages a resurgence in multiple app windows). Unison gets by with a window for groups that sorts groups into a finder like column view, and individual message/preview windows for the groups. It just feels natural, and for the most part seems to be a good compromise between screen real estate and window clutter.
h4. Conclusion
Unison has promise, and a high degree of fit and finish. Another revision or so to fill in some power-user functions and who would want to use anything else?
Have you tried Halime? It is no longer being developed by the author but it has (almost) all the features that Unison has, plus it is free!