Unison for Mac

Pros

This software has zero functionality. It's is outrageous that the developer is demanding payment for a product so deeply flawed it is an insult.

Cons

pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, hang, no response, pause, ad nauseum.

Summary

Don't give up your old Mac because the last functional version of Unison was 1.8.1.

Pros

Absolutely no redeeming features at all

Cons

It simply does not work ... if I cannot download more than a single article at a time manually on an i7 quad with 16 gig of memory and a 256 gig ssd without this program crashing then enough is enough ... it is bad enough having to wait on geological time scales for group headers to download and organise. I have tried for years to give this program the benefit of the doubt, but I have had enough .. it will never be installed in any form again, and nor will I be using any of Panic's other software as there is no way on this Earth I would trust it. Disgraceful customer service performance too, as they are well aware of these issues and have been for years.

Summary

I have never condemned a piece of software as harshly as this before, but in the circumstances, my advice would be don't waste a red cent of your money on this product, as it has NEVER, EVER worked correctly in any version from beta onwards to my knowledge on any machine I have owned. A disgrace to give away, never mind charge for.

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

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.

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

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!

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?

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.

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...!