After nine long grueling months of working on the program in isolation I finally released it to a few select beta testers. In this period I referred to the closed-beta version of the program as Spike.
August 20: Spike 0.7.5 Initial closed-beta release.
August 21: Spike 0.7.6 A few minor bug fixes. The surprise of having other people running the program for the first time was enough to distract me from doing any real coding.
August 21: Spike 0.7.7 The beginnings of keyboard navigation. A new config option to set the text font size.
August 22: Spike 0.7.8 Position of edit window is now saved. Word-wrap line lengths are now adjustable. More keyboard shortcuts. Proper References header generation. Unfortunately a major bug in the References header fix forced me to yank this version before anybody could use it.
August 23: Spike 0.7.8a Fixed show-stopping 0.7.8 bug. Dropping a color sample onto the program no longer makes it crash. Discovered that one of the beta tester's news servers has case-sensitive newsgroups and allows newsgroup names without dots, so I added support for that.
August 24: Spike 0.7.9 Delete key now deletes the current message. Added a menu option to keep the transfer window from popping up by itself.
The early beta testers liked it so it's time to take it on the road. My code name for this period is going to be Skylab, because I listened to MP3s of a group called skylab2000 almost exclusively while writing it the past few months. (These are completely legal MP3s I downloaded from MP3.com, I hasten to add.) Download numbers are from BeBits.
August 25: Skylab 0.8.0 Fixed bug where I wasn't reading the color of the progress bar out of the INI file. Finished almost all of the manual. 293 downloads.
August 29: Skylab 0.8.1 Messages without bodies can now be marked read. Fixed fast-exit crash (I hope). Marking a message read or unread in one newsgroup or storage folder will now mark all cross-posted copies also. Fixed bug where the program wasn't adding "+" to the beginning of positive timezone offsets. Added headers to specify posted messages' content type. Change to allow newsgroup names to start with digits. 423 downloads.
September 3: Skylab 0.8.2 Fixed problem where the program was not properly generating a fake computer name for message-IDs in the case where the user hasn't completely filled in their network settings. Fixed background discoloration in the message view when using the arrow navigation keys. Drastically overhauled the menus. Added catch-up function. Fixed bug where strings were not always displayed in the header bar. Added signature files. Beginnings of rudimentary character set support. 389 downloads.
September 9: Skylab 0.8.3 Further international character support: many new character sets, proper decoding and encoding of accented characters in From and Subject headers, you're allowed to set the character set that your articles are posted in, and you can set the font that will be used for display. Much speedier downloads due to sending multiple requests without waiting for a response to each one. Settings in the INI file added to limit the number of headers and articles downloaded. The amount of time the transfer window waits before closing itself is now adjustable. 481 downloads.
September 17: Skylab 0.8.4 Improved the multiple-request header download speed-up from the last version to be more robust and less error-prone. Added an understanding of MIME message bodies so that the program displays only the text part. Text in Quoted-Printable format is now displayed properly. The program wasn't dealing with the more creative spam-guards very well and was displaying semi-bogus strings for Author and E-mail Address, which has now been fixed by a more intelligent algorithm. 526 downloads.
October 2: Skylab 0.8.5 Fix to allow underscores in newsgroup names. Tweaked the handling of multi-part MIME messages so that certain exotic message types will display better. First attempt at BONE compatibility, which unfortunately didn't work. 601 downloads.
October 22: Skylab 0.8.6 Posting e-mail address is now checked for validity, thereby eliminating too-creative spamblocks. Further BONE tweaking: I was able to recreate an oft-reported bug and fix it. BONE users have reported that the program now works for them. 519 downloads.
November 10: Skylab 0.8.7 Fixed bug where editing messages in the Drafts or Outbox folder would fail to do the proper character set conversion. Fixed bug where international characters were not displayed properly in From and Subject lines if more than one character set is used in a message. (Thanks to multiple-bug-submitter Michael Koenig for both of the aforementioned reports.) Added shortcut keys for the popular Show All Headers and Show Read Messages commands. 322 downloads.
November 17: Skylab 0.8.8 The storage view finally has scrollbars that come and go as needed. To stay consistent the scrollbars on the headers view and message view were changed to appear and disappear as well. Tab key navigation now works to switch between the three main views and a "highlight rectangle" appears briefly to indicate the view that has received the input focus. Word-wrapping rules were changed in the edit window and message views to more accurately reflect what characters can cause word breaks. 758 downloads.
January 9: Skylab 0.8.9 I am in the process of moving to California so I haven't had much programming time lately. So this version does nothing but extend the expire date. Sorry .... 637 downloads
February 21: Skylab 0.8.10 Finally: highlighted clickable URLs! And a new documentation page that explains how it works. Also the manual was getting a bit crufty so I reviewed all of it and edited some parts to more accurately reflect reality. 451 downloads.
March 5: Skylab 0.8.11 Fixed a bug that would sometimes cause the menus on the edit window to become inoperable. Also changed the edit window to have peek-a-boo scrollbars and to display line lengths exactly as they will be in the final post (if you are using a fixed-width font). Fixed another bug where the program was sucking up 100 percent of CPU time during start-up. Tweaked URL highlighting to be a bit more intelligent about what it picks out to highlight and added the ability to save URLs as bookmarks. 566 downloads.
March 11: Skylab 0.8.12 Added ROT13 capability. All items on the Message menu now work on entire threads. A few new keyboard shortcuts. Added a couple of Windows character sets. 463 downloads.
May 24: Skylab 0.8.13 Finished character set support by adding charset defaults and a way to apply a new character set to any message file. Fixed a couple of small stupid bugs. 525 downloads.
July 17: Skylab 0.8.14 Version 0.8.13 expired on July 15 so for one day the world had to make do without Pineapple News. I swear I thought it was going to expire on July 25. When the frantic e-mails started coming in I just happened to be out of town and away from my computer. Sorry folks. On the positive side, I added the ability to display HTML posts in a NetPositive replicant. Server icons now display the total number of unread posts in all their newsgroups. Added color to the transfer window, replacing that drab gray I didn't like. Since this release was very rushed I also introduced a lot of stupid bugs. 188 downloads.
July 21: Skylab 0.8.15 I thought I was finished with the Skylab series but all the bugs I introduced last time around had to be taken care of. Fixed botched From header when the user's posting name contains non-ASCII characters. Newsgroup names with digits at the beginning or end are now legal again. Fixed crash that sometimes occurred when starting to read a new message into the message view. 287 downloads.
A full year of public release and I'm still not done. Hey, it's a big job! But I've finally added mostly-working binary decoding and killfiling, so I decided to start charging for it. I've named this phase after an electronic band called Plaid that is most excellent. Download numbers are from BeBits.
August 16 2001: Plaid 0.9.0 The program now accepts registration keys, which you get when you pay for it. First try at killfiles and binary attachment decoding. (Neither feature will work until you buy a registration key.) 293 downloads.
September 9 2001: Plaid 0.9.1 Fixed a recently introduced bug: the program was not adding the Content-Type header to outgoing messages. Changed the way the binary attachment button behaves: left click views all attachments, right click brings up a menu. The program now saves the default directory for writing attachments in the INI file. Closing the edit window now causes unfinished posts to go into the Drafts folder. Made a bunch of tweaks to the storage view to make it less painful to subscribe to hundreds of newsgroups per server.
October 20 2001: Plaid 0.9.2 The attachment button now visually "depresses" when you click on it. Changed the headers view to be a multiple selection list. Added support for binary attachments that are spread across two or more messages. Added a new window that shows progress for attachment decoding. Fixed the bug that sometimes caused the program to crash when you unsubscribe from a newsgroup.
November 17 2001: Plaid 0.9.3 I'm in the middle of a massive re-write of the program but it's not anywhere near ready for public consumption yet. Therefore the only new thing about this version is a later expiration date than the last one. Sorry folks, but I think it will be more than made up for when you see how cool the program is when I get finished.
December 9 2001: Plaid 0.9.4 Registered users are supposed to be exempt from having to upgrade every time the program expires but a bug was forcing them to anyway, which I have now fixed. Also the program seemed to be causing too much disk activity while removing expired articles and temp files so I changed its parameters significantly so that it goes much slower. As with the last version all my development effort is going into the as yet unreleased re-write, which I'm not finished with, so this will have to do.
March 13 2002: Plaid 0.9.5 No new features. These days I'm busy converting my whole codebase so I can write cross-platform BeOS/MacOSX apps. Sorry!
June 19 2002: Plaid 0.9.6 PNews is now compatible with Dano, the leaked version of BeOS that contains extra features that were never officially released.
August 22 2002: Plaid 0.9.7 No new features, just a later expiration date.
February 26 2003: Plaid 0.9.8 Fixed a bug that made the program think comp.lang.c++ was an invalid newsgroup name. Fixed another bug that would hang the program if it encounters an improperly-formatted article that indicates it is a reply to itself.
August 19 2003: Plaid 0.9.9 Still cranking away on my BeOS/MacOSX framework, so no new features this time except a later expiration date.
January 19 2004: Plaid 0.9.10 Sadly, still nothing but a new expiration date. You should see how much BeOS/MacOSX code I've got, though!
July 25 2004: Plaid 0.9.11 Added a new setting in the .ini file that prevents the program from putting your registered username in posted message headers.
January 14 2005: Plaid 0.9.12 Nothing but a later expiration date.
July 27 2005: Plaid 0.9.13 Nothing but a later expiration date.