Panic Blog

Unison 2 wasn’t the only usenet-related upgrade this week: we’ve also made great improvements to Unison Access, our usenet service.

Remember, to use Usenet, you need two separate things: a Usenet client (that’d be Unison 2), and a Usenet server to access. Some ISP’s provide access, but increasingly, many don’t.

Unison Access is now $9 a month, with unlimited transfer.

That’s right: no transfer limit. And all the trimmings are included: SSL support, a European server, 300 days of binaries, up to 8 simultaneous connections, etc.

There’s more! If you launch Unison 2 with no server configured (or choose “Setup Assistant…” from the Unison menu), you can even try a one-time 24 hour trial of the service, free of charge.

There are a whole lot of excellent choices out there for Usenet service. But since Usenet Access isn’t our bread and butter, we can offer this crazy good deal — one of the best prices you’ll find anywhere.

If you subscribe to Unison Access already, thanks! We’ll keep making it better!

I’ll get right to the point: It’s with great excitement that I announce the release of Unison 2.

I imagine some of you are already gone and downloading. Thanks! For the rest of you: Unison is a Usenet browser. It lets you see, read, listen and download the wealth of content on Usenet servers!

Wh.. what is Usenet? Huh. That’s a little trickier. It goes basically like this: Usenet was really the mother of all internet forums — a ridiculous number of topics and people hosted on a ton of servers that are all kept in sync with each other, across the globe. Before the web, this is how a lot of internet users connected, shared tasty chili recipes, or argued about Kirk vs. Picard vs. Ninjas.

Later, some clever boffins figured out a way that you could also post files onto this global message board. These files would be mirrored to every other Usenet server. And lo, primordial global file sharing was born!

So you’ve got messages, you’ve got files, two groups of users that rarely intersect but each love their Usenet like you wouldn’t believe.

As an app, Unison is definitely a bit niche — “people still use Usenet?” is a question we hear often, but believe me, those that do really do. Here’s how we see it: we may be the only actively developed / modern Usenet client on the Mac right now, it’s the type of app a surprising amount of switchers need and are happy to find, it’s a fun design challenge, and, most importantly, even niches deserve a little love now and then.

So what’s new in Unison 2? We’ve completely redesigned the interface from scratch, unified the browsing experience with an all-in-one view, added a beautiful new group directory, improved message reading with a thread view and thread lines, built in a binary search browser, added automatic UnPAR/UnRAR/skipping of unneeded recovery sets, and much much more.

We’ve also made some significant changes to Unison Access, the companion service we provide. But more about that in the next blog post.

One final note: Unison 2 wouldn’t exist without Dave, who has been working a long time, single-handedly, on this insanely massive update. It’s not an easy app to develop, especially solo, so thanks very much Dave for your hard work!