NewsHound

An NNTP newsfetcher for RISC OS:

• Works in conjunction with one of:
  • Newsbase and Messenger.
  • Pluto.
  • Messenger Pro
• Kill file and filter support
• Full support for header only fetching
• Can fetch a full news group list from the server
• Multiple server support
• Supports NNTP authentication for password protected servers
• Doesn't freeze the computer whilst resolving hostnames
• Doesn't use 'NEWNEWS' (don't worry if this doesn't mean anything to you!)
• Works with ANT, Acornet, Argonet(Voyager), Acorn Internet and FreeNet. (But not Termite)

History

NewsHound was originally born sometime back in the mists of time, around July 1996 just after I finished my first year at Warwick. There are many reasons why I started it - the main one was that FreeNews, the only alternative at the time, wouldn't work with the university news server. I "finished"^[1] it around the end of December and sent it off to Acorn User, who very nicely decided to publish it through there PD scheme on the April '97 cover disc. Then, three months later it became FreeWare and the rest, as they say, is history.

^[1] You never really finish a program like NewsHound. I still have nightmares about some of the feature requests I've had...

About the icon

This is the original NewsHound:

Firstly, it's a dog, okay? It's not a giraffe, dinosaur, hamster, gerbil, fox or a ferret.

Secondly, it took me almost a whole weekend to draw, so I'll tend to get upset when people start calling it anything other than a dog.

Thirdly, you do get dogs that colour. Skip, one of our dogs, is this colour. Admittedly, he's not quite such a bright yellow, but it's as close as I could get with a 16 colour palette. I'll get round to putting up a photo of him someday.

And, finally, I think it looks nice!

As of version 1.39, there's a new icon, as you can see at the top of the page. Many thanks to Richard Whincup for doing them for me!

Where to get NewsHound

You can get it from my download page.

There's a copy of the latest example rule file for NewsHound here, too.

[Home] [My Acorn Software]