Download NewsLeecher 1.0 beta 27

NewsLeecher has released version 1.0 beta 27 of its eponymous program. It is intended to read news and download files via usenet. The developers took a good look at programs like NewsBinPro, NewsPro, BNR, and GrabIt, then took the best points as the basis for NewsLeecher. This release includes a warning when files that may contain malicious code are opened, and an improved cache structure that significantly speeds up loading and writing to groups on the local hard drive. The full changelog looks like this:

1.0 Beta 27 – Released Jul 15, 2004:

• Please check this forum thread if you experience corrupt downloads and think it’s due to a bug in NewsLeecher:
• Added feature that makes it possible to export articles to NZB files. Articles can be exported from the Active Group View, the Server Search View and the Download Queue. The exported NZB files can optionally be compressed to save a few bytes of bandwidth & diskspace. Compression can be selected from the options dialog under ‘Advanced / NZB Files’.
• NewsLeecher now warns before opening files that *might* contain malicious code. Warning is given before opening files with the following extensions: (.bat, .cmd, .com, .exe, .pif, .scr, .vbs).
• Added ‘incremental search’ functionality to the filemanager listview.
• Added ‘Lock Toolbar’ option to the main-toolbar’s popup menu.
• Now showing ‘days ago’ information when receiving group headers.
• The ‘Active Groups’ dropdown box is now sorted and split into categories the same way as the groups in the ‘group manager’. Same thing for the groups in the ‘server search’ listview.
• The ‘Smart’ download feature has just gotten smarter! It will now look for common ‘trash’ strings like ‘.part4.rar’, ‘[3 of 93]’, ‘.vol07+08.par2’, ‘yEnc’, etc, and filter them out before creating the ‘Smart’ download folder.
• NewsLeecher will now select the last used folder when pressing the FileManager’s ‘Go To Parent Folder’ button.
• Changed some internal cache structures to make NewsLeecher faster when loading and saving group cache from disk. The new structure is also lighter on system resources than the previous used structure meaning a bit less memory usage when browsing articles.
• The disk cache system has been changed from v1.0 to v2.0. NewsLeecher will automatically detect the version change and update the cache on the fly when loaded from disk. So there is no need to retrieve all group headers again! The changes were made to prepare support for threaded article view.
• It’s now possible to turn off the shading effect on the sorted columns in the listviews.
• Many internal optimizations.
• Hidden files and folders were shown in the filemanager. Fixed!
• As usual lots of small bug fixes.