How to Use SNews!
Table of Contents
Getting Started
To use SNews!, you must have the snews.jar file in your current
directory. Then, at your UNIX prompt, type
java -cp snews.jar snews.SNews
to run the program. A new window will open with the
SNews! control panel as shown below. There is one command line
argument that can be included, specifying the host to be connected
to, for example
java -cp snews.jar snews.SNews newscache1.freenet.de
The default is news.duke.edu.
Reading an Article
As you can see in the above screenshot, there are no articles to
choose from. In order view a newsgroup, use the expanded list on the
left side to find which group you want and then single-click it.
Subscribing is not supported; all groups are simply listed each time.
Once a group has been selected, the headers will appear in the
adjacent panel. To select an article to view, single-click on the
header you want to make the article appear in the bottom panel. An
example of this process is shown below.
Searching
Two types of searching are supported, searching in the subject lines
of the headers and searching within the body of the selected article.
To search the subject lines, click on the Search All icon in
the icon bar. The following dialogue will pop up.
Then type the word you wish to search for in the prompt. If you wish
to search for a header containing more than one word, simply type all
the words you wish to search for, seperated by spaces. Searching for
phrases is not supported. After pressing OK, a new window will pop up
displaying the headers which contain the search terms, as
shown below, with "post" entered as the search term.
To search for words in the body of an article, click on the
Search icon in the icon bar. The following dialogue will pop
up.
Once again, searching for phrases is not supported. Enter
the search term(s) in the text field. The terms, if found, will then
be highlighted in the article display as shown.
Timing Out
If no requests are made in five minutes, the connection to the host
will be closed. However, upon making a request, the connection will
automatically be reopened and the request answered.
Status Bar
The status bar is at the bottom of the SNews! window. It shows the
current task being performed by the program. Below is a list of
possible status messages:
- done
- open ok, with posting
- open ok, read only
- connection busy
- requesting groups
- requesting headers for (group)
- getting articles (articles shown) (total articles)
- requesting article
- error getting article
- searching
- reestablishing connection
- **problem (code)
- trouble opening port (port) on host (host)
Error Messages
When there is a problem with the connection, the status bar will
change to an error bar, showing "Error:" followed by the error type.
The error types are as follows:
- host problem
- io problem
- error writing
- error reading
- trouble getting group info
- trouble parsing body
- error adding header (line)
Future Releases
Future releases will contain a search method that supports phrases,
which can be identified by being in quotes. Posting will be
supported. Right now, the posting dialogue can be seen by clicking on
Draft on the icon bar. It is shown here.
In addition to simply posting, there will be the ability to reply to
another posting. More header information will be accessible such as
path, ID number, etc. The article header display will be threaded in
the same was as the groups so that earlier replies are under the
original posting. It will be possible to change hosts without exiting
the program and using a new command line argument.