Unison
Posted on January 28, 2004
Filed Under Uncategorized
Panic has a new application out. It’s called Unison, and it’s a usenet news reader. Panic makes Transmit, which I think is the *best* Mac OS X FTP application there is.
I was in the beta test for Unison from the beginning, and now that it’s out I can talk about it and give you my opinion on it.
I could almost review Unison as two separate applications. For downloading images, files, mp3s & media files Unison gets four stars. It’s excellent. For reading and replying to text-based messages, it gets 1.5 stars at best. Not so good, bordering on unusable depending on how you use your usenet access.
If the only reason you would be interested in a usenet application is to get “stuff” then Unison is for you. I’m not going to get into legality or morality here. The stuff is out there, and it’s easier and more reliable to get it off a newsgroup than a peer-to-peer network or website. And not everything on Usenet is porn, warez or copyrighted media. Most is. 
I’ll be honest and say that I used Unison often to download episodes of television shows I forgot to tape. I could have easily downloaded full length movies or music, but I made the conscious decision not to (except as part of my duties as a beta tester, of course).
I’ve been a registered user of Thoth since I first touched OS X in 2001. For $25 you get a full featured, but visually uninteresting application built out of the old free Newswatcher application we all used under System 7. Thoth’s choices of preferences, groups and servers can be overwhelming to the newbie, but once you get used to the way it works it’s the best way to cut your way through the usenet jungle. Still is in many respects. You don’t need pretty toolbars and widgets to get newsgroup content. And now that Unison is out with a price tag of $24.95, Thoth is practically a bargain for all it does in comparison.
Unison has a separate tab for files and music and you can click on a button and only see the media files. Pure messages are in a separate pane. Point, click & download. You still have to reassemble multi-part files before using them (I recommend MacPAR deLuxe for this) but Unison makes it very easy. The RIAA would probably think it’s a bit *too* easy. For music, you can preview the song before downloading. Like iTunes Music Store except questionable legality and not limited to 30 seconds.
You can preview all the images in a newsgroup in a gallery window and select just the ones you want to save to disk. I’m sure most guys use this feature to flip through stills in the alt.binaries.disney newsgroup. 
Files, which includes programs, fonts & media are in their own tab but no preview.
Where Unison fails and fails miserably in my opinion, is with text-based newsgroups. This is where Thoth shines heads and shoulders above Unison. There’s a lot of “noise” on Usenet. No newsreader is worth anything if it doesn’t have filtering. The only filtering in Unison is based on the “from” header. So if you want to see your own posts, or the posts of a friend you can do that in Unison. But there is no way to filter on any other header. In Thoth, I have a filter set up to look for my email address in the reference header. That way, I can see days later if someone has replied to a post I made even if my original message doesn’t appear since it’s “read”. I can even filter those to the top. In Thoth you can make filters as simple or as complicated as you want, looking for certain phrases or combination of letters across a single group or multiple groups.
Unison is also designed for the person who checks a single news server. Panic is offering their own news server, called “Access.” It’s $11.95 a month for 10GB of downloads, which is exactly what I’m already paying with Giganews. But Giganews is faster, has more groups and more retention than the new Panic server. Plus loyalty and referrer rewards. I see no reason whatsoever to switch.
But what about if you want to check other news servers? Adobe and Macromedia both offer their tech support forums via usenet (although with Adobe you can only read messages via nntp). So does Project Seven who make extensions for Dreamweaver that I use. Right now in Thoth I have 5 different news servers available, and each has their own browsing group. There’s no point in seeing the Adobe newsgroups when I’m reading messages in the Macromedia server. But in Unison, while you can set multiple usenet servers, there’s only one window. All of your “subscribed” newsgroups appear in the same window whether they are part of the server you’re currently in or not. And you have one active server at a time. In Thoth, I could download headers from Giganews and scan support forum messages from Dreamweaver at the same time.
There’s no denying that Unison is “pretty”. It looks like a Mac application and it’s well-written as you would expect from the folks at Panic. But it’s clearly meant to introduce Usenet to the masses and to facilitate getting more than text from Usenet. If you already have a usenet reader and it serves you well, chances are you won’t be able to replace it with Unison and it will be difficult to justify its $24.95 price tag.
And yes, I expressed all this to the developers during the beta test.
