Software Update: NewsLeecher 4.00 Beta 4

Last Friday, the fourth beta release of NewsLeecher 4.00 was released. With this program it is possible to download files from newsgroups in a simple way. NewsLeecher has support for nzb files, has a so-called ‘super search’ and can automatically check downloaded files for completeness and then extract them automatically. The main improvement in version 4.00 is the support for threads. Furthermore, adjustments have been made to deal with the increased retention of super search: it is now 370 days. Below is the changelog for this fourth beta release:

Note:

• This release uses a new format for setup and configuration files. NewsLeecher will automatically detect earlier formats of the setup and configuration files and upgrade to the new format without any user intervention. But note that older versions of NewsLeecher will not be able to identify the new format, so downgrading will reset most settings. It is therefore recommended that you backup your NewsLeecher installation before installing this release, just in case anything goes wrong.

New features:

• Reintroduced a lot of the features which were removed in the first NewsLeecher version 4.0 betas. The reintroduced features include listview font name and size configuration, listview entry height configuration, turning on / off the speedgraph background logo etc..
• Added ‘Notify on New Final Release’ and ‘Notify on New Beta Release’ checkboxes to the news-page toolbar.
• The Repair’n’Extract status column now shows the extraction speed for extracting archives in MB/s
• Lots of ‘advanced user’ tweaks have been added to the setup dialog. The settings can be accessed from ‘Setup -> Advanced Nerd Tweaks’. The new tweaks include listview entry color shade settings for sorted columns and collections, the possibility to set the size of the speedbar on the tray icon, etc..

Improved features

• NewsLeecher uses a new format for the setup and configuration files. Reading from, and writing to, the new format is between 10 and 1000 times faster than with the old format. And as NewsLeecher reads and writes a lot of settings during operations, this change will have a positive impact on the overall performance.
• Totally re-organized the setup dialog, to make it much easier to configure and run NewsLeecher from scratch. All of the non-essential options and settings have been moved to a new setup section called ‘Advanced Nerd Tweaks’. NewsLeecher will run fine without playing around with this new section, but the settings and options can be tweaked to optimize and personalize NewsLeecher further if wanted. Due to this new section, the rest of the setup dialog, containing more essential NewsLeecher settings and options, has been greatly simplified.
• Repair’n’Extract will now extract archives ASAP, instead of waiting until all Repair’n’Extract entries have been verified.
• Improved the ‘Filters Dialog’ by replacing the filters listview control with a memo control. The memo control allows much faster editing of filters, aswell as batch copy/paste operations.
• All ‘Group Browsing’ settings and filters have been moved to the setup dialog. The ‘Group Browsing’ setup dialog can be accessed fast by clicking the ‘Settings’ button on the ‘Group Browsing’ toolbar.
• Improved the easy-of-use of the download counter, located on the status bar.
• Lots of minor improvements. (Changed the standard pixel height of listview entries, new graphics in setup dialog, etc.)

Fixed bugs:

• Fixed serious bug introduced in previous betas, where NewsLeecher sometimes totally screw up the download destination folder path when downloads were initiated from NZB files and the ‘Download to Groupname Folder’ option was used at the same time.
• Fixed bug where the NewsLeecher article header retrieval function would skip certain headers, because their subjects used a format which wasn’t recognized by NewsLeecher.
• Fixed bug where NewsLeecher would sometimes pause the transfer queue automatically when the scheduler is active:
• Fixed bug introduced in previous betas, where Repair’n’Extract would sometimes delete PAR Split sets.
• Fixed bug where the queue ‘Change Download Folder’ feature didn’t always work properly.
• Fixed bug introduced in previous betas, where the ‘Export to NZB’ feature would freeze NewsLeecher, if the ‘ZIP Compress exported NZB File’ option was on.
• Fixed bug where some of the group browser filters would occasionally cause the group browser listview to freeze:
• Fixed bug where the time label on the bandwidth graph sometimes showed an incorrect timespan text while the graph was resized.
• Numerous smaller bug fixes.