Publisher's Description
From Panic:
Unison is a carefully-crafted, genuinely revolutionary Mac OS X Usenet newsreader. It offers all the expected newsreader functionality: easy-to-navigate threaded discussions, the ability to ignore annoying posters, multiple signature management, and easy, Mail-like posting with spell checking and all the trimmings.
But it also goes much, much further than any other Usenet client on earth, starting with a unique four-view interface that lets you view and work with Usenet group content in four distinct styles: messages, files, images, or music. It lets you preview MP3 files directly off a Usenet server, view images in an elegant iPhoto-like thumbnail view, prioritize transfers with a flexible downloads manager, find favorites quickly with a categorized column-view interface, smartly group files into meta-groups (like songs into albums), show download status beautifully in the dock, and much more. Phew!
What's new in this version: New interface, new search, new unified view, new... wait, it's all new!
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All versions:
4.0 starsout of 92 votes
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Current version:
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"After all this time it's still junk"
Version: Unison 2.1.7
Pros
Can't think of any?, the program stinks
Cons
I've seen more bouncing beach balls than a visit to a waterpark, constant lockups and no timely fix's. I can't remember the last upgrade to this program and it sure needs one or maybe a complete re-write, it's crap and not worth $.05. Save your money till they really fix it, this program can really turn your day to crap, and shame on you PANIC at this point I would not buy any of your programs for fear they would work the same way, turn the code over to someone willing to make it work, you sure don't seen to care
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"Not impressed yet"
Version: Unison 2.1.7
Pros
Fast downloading
Cons
The 3-window interface isn't well-suited to reading Usenet news, this design makes me think it's just a quick adaptation of an email program. Post threading is inconsistent. When you click on a group name, the number of posts disappears, making it hard to keep track when shifting between groups or even just between a group list and your download tracking. All in all, I never would have left Thoth if it hadn't stopped working for me. For all the raving about this software having a "modern" interface, it doesn't really have a useful interface for anything but email.
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"Hangs when you have a group with a lot of articles"
Version: Unison 2.1.2
Pros
Not much, wish I'd stayed with the old ver.
Cons
It still hangs, takes forever to sort, and you still can't set all the text sizes, wish there was another news group reader
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"Best Mac Usenet reader out there."
Version: Unison 2.1.1
Pros
The best, and it keeps getting better. Much faster par assembly in this version.
Cons
Slow to load large numbers of headers.
Summary
The best... bar none!
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"Version 2.1 still does not work well enough to use"
Version: Unison 2.1
Summary
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
2.1 still is so slow as to be unusable. Furthermore, I doubt Panic really cares...they update this program on geologic time and the problems with Unison have consequently been around for a long time.
The speed problem with the current version 2.1 is also present in 2.0.5 and 2.0.4. I use 2.0.3 because its marginally fast enough to be usable but its not -much- faster and it corrupts downloads (something they have fixed in the current version). If there was a modern alternative that ran under Snow Leopard then I would use it...but Panic gets away with selling this worthless program for $29, and not fixing it, because no one else has written an alternative or updated the other NNTP clients in years.
Problems I have with the program:
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When you open Unison it may take up to two hours, 120 minutes, to open fully if you have subscribed to groups with large numbers of new postings. Even if there are only a few thousand new postings spread across 20-30 groups, it will easily take 45 minutes to an hour to have every group ready to use. This is very clearly a programming error because the articles are actually downloaded very fast...Unison just doesn't process them. If you force quit during startup, the groups already processed will pop up as ready on restart...to avoid a delay spanning hours, you must force quit every 5-10 minutes to cut the start up down to half an hour or so. I don't consider this acceptable but its the only way to make it work.
If you try to change groups, Unison stalls for 1-5 minutes, sometimes longer.
If you try to open an article while Unison says it is downloading new posts, it stalls for 5-10 minutes.
Sometimes Unison never comes out of its stalls and simply beachballs forever.
Whenever Unison is stalled, it severely slows down the rest of the activity on your mac...safari pages take a minute to open, mail collection hangs or times out, opening dashboard can take 30 seconds. This is not a particularly slow mac either, its a 2.8Ghz Core2Duo MBP. Furthermore, activity monitor says that overwhelmingly, Unison is just sitting there not doing anything but repeatedly looping.
One has to ask whether Panic does any kind of testing on the releases of this program, these problems are not sporadic or hard to reproduce...read the other reviews here. The only people happy with this program either work for Panic or maybe they check one group that gets one new posting every month? -
"Still waiting"
Version: Unison 2.0.5
Summary
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
Still waiting for 2.0.6, Panic you can't leave this program like this, it's still 1 step up from a beta? I know there's only 1 programmer working on this but please fix some of the screw-ups, don't leave it like this. -
"Is this an upgrade or a downgrade?"
Version: Unison 2.0.5
Summary
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
I recently upgraded to Unison 2.0.5 because 1.8 had started to crash frequently after the latest Snow Leopard updates. But OMG! This thing is sloooooow! I just redownloaded the cache for a 4,000,000 messages NG (it doesn't recognize the cache of the previous version, apparently), and now I have been waiting for about 20 minutes for it to show me the NG on screen. It's still "fetching"...
Other than that, it succeeded in crashing my iMac in a way I had never seen in 3 years (black box in middle of screen in 5 languages telling me to hold down the power button to shut down the computer).
Am I ever underwhelmed...! -
"Unison 2.0 has problems"
Version: Unison 2.0.5
Pros
Good user interface, improved over version 1
Cons
Performance (time to load directory, display file headers, etc.) is not good at all, much worse than the previous version. Files can no longer be marked as "read," which means you can't quickly go to new uploads.
Summary
Unison 1 was a solid product that let you do what you needed to do quickly and easily. With the new release that no longer is possible. The combination of poor performance and the inability to mark files you've already seen means it's no longer a viable option for serious usenet users. Too bad, but maybe they'll get back on track with the next release.
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"Still doesn't work"
Version: Unison 2.0.5
Summary
This review was originally posted on VersionTracker.com.
Hangs loading groups, hangs threading articles, hangs applying rules....worst version yet...and this is on an 8GB, 2.8ghz macbook pro. -
"Not yet fully reliable"
Version: Unison 2.0.3
Pros
This is a visionary product and has most of the information that is valuable for a newsgroup binary downloader displayed on a single screen. Unison is a downloader and that works, with sometimes strange crashes when you quit mid download.
Cons
The newly minted expansion facilities for RAR files is more complex and logically challenging. I am fairly certain that the bugs will be ironed out soon, but for now, if reliability is what you seek, go for the simpler Unison 1.8
Summary
Flawed but promising, occasional crashes on quitting and logic difficulties around reassembly of numerous RAR files into final file.
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