Unison is a solid Usenet news reader available for Mac OS X 10.5 and later. It is designed for downloading binaries and reading Usenet news groups. It offers everything you would expect from a quality reader such as threaded discussions, blocking of annoying or nuisance posters, multiple signature management and spell checking. Unison for Mac comes with a distinctive four-sided interface that allows you to view and work with Usenet group content in four different ways namely messages, files, images, or music. It allows you to store files into groups, create favorites, and thread messages. It comes with an advanced search feature that can be coupled with rules to organize files better. Its built-in download manager allows you to download multiple files at a time. It also allows you to rearrange your download queue according to the level of their importance while you can also pause and launch items based on their priority. Unison also has some thoughtfully integrated features, like an audio preview, automatic unarchiving (with unRAR and unPAR), and automatic skipping of unneeded files.
Unison from Panic Incorporation is a carefully-crafted, genuinely revolutionary Mac OS X Usenet news reader. Unison for Mac gives its users the opportunity to read messages using a thread view, which makes it much easier for them to browse through all the content. Thread lines make it easier to see who replied to any given message and also allows you to post and view messages in HTML or plain text.
Installing Unison is buttery smooth and comes with no issues at all. You begin by finding your login details from your Usenet provider and inputting them into server’s preference option. Immediately you are done with that; Unison will take over the rest. You can also fine tune the app settings from the setup option. You can set the amount of headers or articles to download, which is superb if you are on a slow connection. Unison comes with a new “Directory” feature aimed at new users to help them find the news groups they want. The directory houses a lot of topics with links to the newsgroups. Once you have found the news group you want, double click on it and add to the sidebar. If you do download a lot of files, especially from alt.binaries, the download options within Unison is very useful. It makes download and opening files a breeze. The number of headers you download will depend on how many articles you can read at once so you can download as many headers as you can read if needs be.
In conclusion, because of its special Mac feel of being well designed and an intuitive interface with enough features to make it count, one would easily agree with me that Unison is the perfect Mac application for accessing Usenet. It costs $29 and comes with a 15-day trial, so you can determine whether or not it is the right application for you.
