In this appendix, we present a wish list for possible future features
in NewsWatcher. Please note that this list is not any kind of promise
that the features will ever actually be implemented. Indeed, your
humble author got old and tired a few years ago and retired from
active major NewsWatcher development. He still tries to fix bugs and do
other minor maintenance from time to time, and he tries to answer
questions about the program, but that's all. Perhaps some other
programmer will like to work on these things.
A Mark Kept command. Articles and threads which are marked "kept" are
not marked read when you catch up with the Next Group command, so
they appear again the next time you open the subject window for the
group. This is convenient when you don't have time to read or reply
to an interesting article, but think that you may have the time later
in some other newsreading session.
Implement the Undo command for text editing actions 
and for at least the "Mark" and "Next" commands, especially for the Next Group
command.
Posting binaries.
Filtering and killfiles.
Hierarchical full group list with Finder-like triangle controls.
The ability to attach various preferences to arbitrary nodes in the
full group list hierarchy. E.g., filtering rules, character set
preferences, signature prefs, etc.
Multiple signatures.
Optional trn-style reference threading.
Support the XOVER extension to the NNTP protocol.
Optional display of article sizes and posting date/time in subject
windows. This could be done via additional XHDR commands at the time
subject windows are constructed and displayed, or via XOVER.
Properly show cross-posted articles only once. The current version
does this properly only if you open one of the cross-posted articles.
Doing this all the time would require access to the XREF header line
at the time subject windows are constructed and displayed, which
would require the use of XOVER or additional XHDR commands.
Solve the problem of articles sometimes appearing out of order. The
best way to do this would be to use XOVER and use reference threading
instead of subject threading.
Show progress bars for long operations.
MIME and Base64 support.
Non-Roman language support: Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.
Additional character set options. For example, tell NewsWatcher to
map all 8 bit characters to their nearest US-ASCII equivalent, and
support for various goofy non-MIME character set mappings used in
some European countries.
An Apple guide.
Triple-click to select line.
A "Get FAQ" command to get and display the FAQ ("Frequently Asked
Questions") for a group from a user-configured FAQ archive site.
A "Get Info" command to get information from the server about
selected groups (e.g., the description of the group supplied by
XGTITLE) and articles (e.g., the article size, date, and other info
from the header).
Offline newsreading support.
Improved facilities for accessing old articles which have been marked
read. E.g., a command to restore all the articles in a thread in a
subject window. Implement a full header cache to make these and other
operations more efficient.
Use the Thread Manager to perform operations asynchronously to
improve performance, especially for dialup users. E.g., posting and
mailing messages in the background, displaying article text as it
arrives from the server, pre-fetching the next article in the
background, extracting binaries in the background, fetching subjects
and authors in the background, checking for new groups and articles
in the background, etc.
Full object model Apple event support. Scripting and recording. Open
Scripting Architecture. (almost)
Break the 32K TextEdit limit, probably by using the WASTE text
engine.
Better support for multiple news servers.
Features for dealing with digests.
Spell checking via the word services Apple event suite.
Kerberos authentication. INN 1.5 "generic" authentication.
Digital signatures (PGP).
Proxy server support.
Eudora nicknames in mail message windows, and saving articles
directly to Eudora mailboxes
Permit customizing the format of the attribution line:
In article <message-id>, email-address (full-name) wrote:
Secure socket support to work with Netscape's "secure" news server.
Socks support for people behind firewalls.
