[OT] Newsgroup reader for iPhone/iPad

Needs work. No differentiation between quoted text and replies. That’s just useless.

Tim

"Useless" - That's a bit harsh. The first new usenet client for IOS for years, so be kind.

Would you use a client that doesn’t support quoting?

It’s true that the options are incredibly limited and I welcome a new one, but it needs work. Hopefully the poster will take on board constructive comments.

Tim

Well, any comments are welcome

I’ll look into it to see how can I implement block for quotes within the post.

The reason why I didn’t implement this is, in HK, people don’t quote any text when replying just like using Facebook or Twitter (x now)

Anyway, thanks for your comment Is there anything needs to be improved as well?

That’s absolutely fine

Actually, I developed this app more than 10 years ago. But for some reasons, I limited it to HK AppStore only

It’s a USENET convention to always quote text to provide context. Without obvious differentiation between quoted text and replies things could get very confusing.

Fix that and then I’ll have another look. Your efforts are appreciated though as the options for accessing USENET on an iPad are currently very limited.

Tim

You might be interested in a web interface to Usenet I'm working on. It's intended to be usable on desktop or mobile devices. It does quote the text you are replying to - see above (I've edited that down of course). It can be found at

Is it voice over compatible? If yes then might I suggest that an option to make a noise on quoted text might be good, fed up with greater than etc being spoken in quoted text. Brian

Spent few days to work on that just wanna make sure if I’m doing correctly May I know if this is what you want?

iPad:

That sounds interesting I’ve never touch accessibility dev kit but it should be support voice over natively as the UI in Newsygroup is pretty standard

What kind of noise you expect? Could you give me some example so that I can explore the possibility?

Quoting sorted now thank you. I think though that one needs a view of just the subject lines without seeing some or any of the content of the posts. At present I skip over a large number of messages because the subject isn’t of interest. Your interface makes it very slow to scroll through all the posted subjects as it’s displaying to contents of each new message in addition to the subject line.

Regards,

Tim

I can split the quotes/unquoted text into blocks so that u can select them individually for voice over Would it be easier for you?

Example:

Brian is blind, so he won't be able to see that. It looks like you have a highlighted box over each level of quoted text. It looks like the box is over the quoted text alone, eg "Don't bother waiting in... Actually it looks like it's a drop shipping warehouse"

If you're able to include the introduction line that says who wrote it then it might make more sense, ie:

'On 09/05/2024 10:39 Andy Burns wrote: "Don't bother waiting in... Actually it looks like it's a drop shipping warehouse"'

then the voiceover would make more sense, otherwise it's hard to distinguish one speaker from another. Even better if they could have different voices :-)

No sure how easy it is to determine those, especially when people trim them in followups. There doesn't seem to be a standard format for introduction lines (which are often in the language of the poster's client, not always English)

But even just allowing highlighting of different levels of quoting seems better than speaking 'greater than greather than...'

Theo

I’ve made Newsygroup more VoiceOver friendly

Here is the results:

And I’m not VoiceOver user, I might need more feedbacks to make it better. If you or Brian don’t mind, I can send out TestFlight invitation by apple to test the beta version of Newsygroup.

That sounds pretty good. Brian, this is a video but you should be able to understand it from the audio alone - it's from the 'warehouse fire' thread of a few days ago.

It's a pity it speaks URLs and punctuation out character by character, but I suppose that's something Voiceover does as standard.

I'm not an iOS user these days, but if he doesn't reply here you could send Brian an email and see if he's interested in testing. I think the email on his posts might work.

Theo

BTW, you could also post in uk.comp.sys.mac where there's a number of iOS using folks who might be interested.

Theo

Actually, the preview of message function is requested by some other users.

I’ve added new option in settings menu so that you can turn off the preview. Let’s update the app and try again

Thanks Theo 😉