WinVN

WinVN -- Before News Xpress and Free Agent arrived, WinVN was king of the windows newsreaders. Amazing how things can change in less than a year. Half a year ago, WinVN was superseded by the powerful features of both Free Agent and News Xpress. The developers have worked long and hard to catch up to the two new monarchs, and their efforts have not gone unnoticed. Several new features and improvements to old ones, as well as the efficiency and ease of use that have always been WinVN's strongest points, have WinVN once again nearing the title of 'top dog'. WinVN uses the tiled-windows approach for listing newsgroups, article lists, and individual articles, which is a definite improvement over Trumpet News' split-windows screen, but not quite as appealing as the Free Agent or even the News Xpress layout. WinVN is one of the easiest to use newsreaders available, plus there is plenty of on-line help to get new users acquainted with the program. Built-in UUdecoding and mail sending abilities have been implemented well, but the low-level killfile support could be improved with a user interface and configurable menu. Another of WinVN's strong points is its ability to sort articles in almost every imaginable manner. Overall, WinVN's features match favorably with the top two newsreaders, but still fall just short in quantity. WinVN is a good newsreader to get started with, but the serious news junkies will likely still want to move up to either News Xpress or Free Agent. Pros: Easy customization, relatively quick, good on-line help, great search capabilities Cons: Lacks features like thread monitoring, advanced kill-file, autoselect, and quick purging New: Low-level killfile support, long filename support (in 32-bit version), many bug fixes Version Reviewed: 0.99.8 Beta 2 Date of Review: 4/18/96 Reviewer: Forrest Stroud