What a mess

To get a sense of how arbitrary and ridiculous the CNET/download.com reviews are, compare their reviews for Xnews and NewsPro. Xnews gets a 5 rating, the highest possible, and it has one of the most confusing and poorly designed user-interfaces I've ever seen in a newsreader, even for someone who's familiar with the genre. Functionally, it's fairly complete, but it's very easy to open too many connections to a news server, while not utilizing available connections (usually 2) effectively, slowing downloads. It crashes fairly often, makes you wait during lengthy operations, even halting the mouse cursor and preventing access to other running programs. After using it for a few weeks, it started to have problems decoding binaries properly on many messages, displaying them as gobbledygook text. As freeware, Xnews is worth every penny you pay for it. NewsPro's user-interface is probably a little daunting at first, especially to novice users, but it's logical and easy to figure out. It also facilitates some fancy and useful functionality that lets you: maximize available connections to the news server to speed downloads; and prioritize messages for download in elegant ways. The developers have engineered the multi-tasking/multi-threading features well. The price is a little high for a newsreader, but at least you're buying a well-crafted tool. Of course, CNET rates it only a 4 out of 5.

Posted: 25-Sep-2004 08:52:13 AM