ALEXANDRA

Frequently asked Questions about Features

When I hit reply and append signature is on, the following happens: A Mail compose window is opened... Mail inserts my signature... Everything is selected... And replaced by the quoted text form the news article! Maybe it is better not to select everything, but to take insertion by Mail into consideration and only select the first 0 bytes before pasting the quoted text into the mail compose text object.

As far as I remember this is out of our control. (The Mail API ist very restricted.)

Maybe the '--' inserted before the inserted signature should be modifiable, as it is in Mail.app.

No way! This is the only officially sanctioned signature delimiter and (in theory) it is just that, a delimiter which serves to indicate the beginning of the signature to the reader application. It shouldn't be displayed in the first place! Okay, some readers do but at least a lot of modern newsreaders make use of it and display the signature in a different style than the rest of the article. And since Alexandra relies on the delimiter as well it would be completely counterproductive not to enfore the use of `-- ' to delimit body and signature.

Alexandra - other than NewsGrazer - cannot read news without an NNTP server. Will a flat-file mode be supported in future versions?

It'd be really nice to have a "Local Read" option. I'd like to be able to grab all news articles (for subscribed groups) at one time and then read them from my local disk (like in /tmp). That way I can disconnect from my internet provider and not tie up my phone for so long.

This is not a technical problem, it has more to do with why we developed Alexandra. Since we're working on Alexandra in our spare time only our goal cannot be to implement a program that takes into account all backward compatibility issues and handles all the little nasty details of everyday newsreading. What we wanted to do is to provide a sample implementation of a GUI newsreader that can be used as a testbed for more or less advanced features. Like the newspaper mode for example. It is then up to commercial implementations to pick up these ideas and turn them into a supported application. (Given that, we think Alexandra is fairly usable.)

This makes clear why we don't support all possibilites to receive news but chose the one which we think is technically superior. The combination of a news-server, probably with a built-in cache like NOV and some other mechanism to transport news, resembles a classical client/server-architecture. Alexandra is a client application and we have no plan to re-implement server features. Sorry, but I hope you understand.

Since I use mail and UUCP for news feed, flatfile support is mandatory.

It is not true that flatfile is the only mode that can be used in a "home" configuration. Constantin and me, we both receive our news via a UUCP link but this doesn't prevent us from reading them with a local NNTP server. Constantin uses a combination of CNews and a dedicated NNTP-server package and I'm using INN. No problem with that and after activating the News Overview Database (NOV) Alexandra flies.

Threading of articles (à la Netscape or tin, or ...)

We're investigating this and an experimental version is already working. This feature will be included in version 0.9.

Article numbers in the article summary.

This will be included in version 0.9. (Although we really don't know what they are good for. Can somebody enlighten us?)

How about a Search panel to search through all the articles in a group for a keyword?

This is planned for Version 0.9.

Please display the date header when reading news in the Newspaper mode.

Personally, I don't think that this is necessary because you already have the `clockview' next to the buttons. BTW, we've been asked to add a couple of other headers to the newspaper headers. Basically, the newspaper mode is supposed to look nice - if you need more information you can switch back to conventional mode or open the "inspector" panel. The display in Alexandra 0.9 will be completely configurable.

It'd be nice if the compose window (for writing a followup article) had a button for "post and reply". The user could hit this when done with the followup article, and it'd post the article and then open up a Mail.app window with the same text, and addressed to the person who wrote the original.

This will be included in version 0.9.

Don't you think that it is dangerous that if you select a root-group, eg. `comp' in browser mode and then click on unsubscribe or catch-up the action is carried out on all groups in this hierarchy?

Admitted. We're going to include a request for confirmation if more than, say, 20 groups are affected by a single command in a later version.