Panic Blog

I am leaving work early to go home and install this. That is all.

That is one sexy ‘U.’ Congrats on the new release!

I’ve been testing this for many months. It’s a solid and great update.

I can’t use my old license from unison? What’s that about?

Jeroen: It’s a pretty major release. As such, Panic is having everyone get a new license for this new version so that they get paid for all their hard work. Those of us who already have Unison 1, get a upgrade discount.

Ok fair.. Love your products and I’m sure it will be worth it!

What’s the connection number limit on the service? I thought I had a good deal with my current provider, but I’ll take a retention hit for a much cheaper price.

Thanks much, should be plenty to saturate my beefy FIOS connection. :)

Well i’m using it and it i’ts a big BIG improvement compared to the previous version!

Great job!

Loving the new icon. Does this mean there will be new icons for Coda, Transmit and Candybar?

Loving the new version of Unison… I can’t wait to see whats in store for Transmit & Coda.

Thank you Panic. Unison is one of my favourite applications, and its great to see it updated.

While built–in support for unPAR and unRAR is welcomed, is there a performance benefit to using Unison automatically over MacPAR, Unarchiver, or UnRarX?

Wow finally the long awaited new version of Unison! And it looks damn good.

Loving it so far. One thing though: It’d be nice if the Search function supported password protected https sites.

Looks great, works great, but I think your serial number system is broken because your site keeps telling me it’s “unknown required load command 0x80”

Awesome new version!
Same remark as cgrin above me though : after purchasing the upgrade, your system keeps telling me my serial is not a serial…
And yeah, would be fantastic if the search function supported password protected https sites.

Yay, I only brought Unison a month ago so nice that you’re keeping us recent buyers sweet by not charging the $18 upgrade fee. I had my card all warmed up for this new awesomeness but it’s just insanely neat you saved me reading those 12 digits and that funny one on the back, kudos.

I never heard of this before, seriusly, what is this so a person that is very lost can understand easily. Is this a torrent kind of app a limewire kind of app or a download manager??? what is this???

Outstanding upgrade! Kinda hard to get used to the new interface, but it looks great. I’m bummed that I had to add my old newsgroups manually and to put them into folders that I previously had in version 1.

Good job and thanks to Dave for the hard work.

I’m a big fan of Panic generally, and would love to love Unison, but I’m still baffled at the reluctance to put even rudimentary e-mail capability in. The inability to post to Usenet with e-mail copies to others (and myself), and to post to Usenet *by* e-mail, from within the Usenet client (which is possible for moderated groups, and sometimes a very useful thing to be able to do), mean it just doesn’t work for me. Still, forgive the moans. The support for Usenet generally is much appreciated.

Beautiful UI!

Guys… long time Panic Fan here, who loves your Apps! Too bad they are not available for Win and Linux as well! ;)
I’ve just received an auto mailer from Cabel reminding me that Panic is cleaning up subscription lists therefore if I want I could unsubscribe and stop receiving email from Panic… now why in the world would I want to do such a thing!? LOL!

You are the only company I know of that sends emails to their subscribers reminding them that they have an option to unsubscribe, usually companies do the opposite and try keep people hooked so they can show investors and advertising client what a large subscription list they have!… LOL

…well that may just be another way why we love Panic and we keep sticking around buying your awesome software! :D

Best to the whole team and Happy 2010 to all!

wow, what an update. the only thing it seems to be missing is a “sort by average age” for the transfer queue. without this having a large queue is a nightmare to manage.

I like it, I like it. Some of my habits are broken, probably for the best. There no longer seems to be a concept of a “read file” however. If I want to clear things out of a file list, it seems that all I can do is delete it (which I assume is irreversible) rather than mark the file/thread as read and viewing only unread. The advantage of keeping them around is that if I change my mind about something it’s still there until it actually expires and I could re-display. Have I just missed this function somewhere, or have I correctly understood how it works in Unison 2? Quite looking forward to playing around with this, though.

Just digging into the 2.0 version, but so far it looks nice. I was a bit bummed to see I would have to pay for this upgrade, but when I searched my mail archives for my original S/N I found I purchased Unison back in ’05.

I feel I have gotten my $25 worth out of that purchase, I’m sure I’ll get $18 more worth out of this. Thanks, guys!

Looks good, but per PaulH – where are the ‘Mark as read’ and ‘Show Unread’ commands. Is (irreversible) Delete the new alternative?

I actually am VERY glad to see that you didn’t expand Unison to do email. That’s what the Mail app is for.

But why wouldn’t you add filtering? Or Face/X-Face display? This is very nice.. but I get these things from MT-Newswatcher and I don’t have to pay to license it.

I’ve asked about these since 1.8. When you do that, I’ll consider this a potential for a commercial product.

another vote for a “sort by average age” for the transfers list. i use sabnzbd as my nzb downloader of choice and since I have a large queue (50+ items) not being able to sort them by oldest -> newest (download items nealry out of retention) is a deal killer for me

once unison has this, i’ll likely make the switch (with a few other sabnzbd users im guessing)

This is an awesome upgrade. I’ve used Unison for years and this makes it much more useable! Congrats on excellent work. I’ve come to expect nothing less from Panic. High bar, I know, so get back to work and stop reading comments!

Love the new UI! Only thing i miss after using it really quickly is being able to select a folder where the unpacked files from the RARs should go (~/Movies for example). Perhaps configure this per group.

One other thing: i’ve used Newsleecher (Windows-only client) and it seems to be smart about downloading PARs: start by downloading the PARs first and then incrementally check the validity of the rest of the files using the PAR files. This was the feeling the app gave my anyway: there didn’t seem to be any large disk/CPU activity at the end of the download to verify the PARs.

Hey, i love this. Already whipped out the credit card, now im off to put in my digits :)

But one feature that i still miss: The ability to show either a percentage, time remaining or just a progress bar instead of the (5|14) icon hint.

After that the app will be perfect!

Thanks Dave for the great work!!!
Thanks to Tim and the rest of the people, great upgrade to a already great program.
Glad you charged for upgrade, need to get paid so you can continue the work.

very nice, finally an update… no wonder its taken so long, one dude for the whole thing!..so kudos to you! i tell you what i think is missing though! lol
A Default location for extracted files. you have one for downloaded files but now you have built in par/rar it makes sense to have a default folder for the extracted files.
Also, a setting to not download the sample files, or auto delete the samples and the .nfo, .srr, .sfv on successful extraction.

Im sure u’ll get plenty of these “suggestions” and most likely we might see them in Unison 3.0 (in another 3 years time). Don’t get me wrong i think the work you are doing is amazing!! i mean this thing is fucking beautiful! its just id like to see more updates! Unison could be so much bigger! if it got regular updates, i know thats why a lot of the people stopped using unison because of the lack of updates, sabznzb as some really cool features. but its FUGLY… so not for me!

what i would really (wishful thinking here) like to see is some kind of filter that moves certain file types to different locations e.g
(add types) mp4,avi,mkv (move to folder) Movies
(add types) mp3 (move to folder) music
you get the idea.. there could be so much more to unison its such a great program but it could be HUGE, if you’d just throw some more men on it, i know id buy it for £70 if i thought this is going to be updates every few months with the latest features.

please! more updates!

I love to see my formerly favourite piece of usenet software updated. There was one reason I switched to alternatives like hellanzb and most recently sabnzbd: threaded file download via multiple connections. It seems that this has not been implemented yet, or am I missing something? I might be missing something. Other than that, great work! I am almost sold.

Another feature from sabnzbd you should steal – providing a web interface to allow you to queue up NZBs remotely. Granted this feature comes for free with sabnzbd since it’s already a web app, still, it is a deal killer for me as much as I love the new UI!! Great job!

Amazing UI and Lovely new features(search, par files).
Thanks for your hard work!

So a lot of people would be happier if you brought back a single feature, “Mark Read” both as a toolbar icon and as a contextual menu item. I do find it strange for this to have been eliminated, although there is a “Mark All Read” icon that is normally greyed out. Personally, I don’t want all that baggage and I do indeed want to really delete headers when I’m done with them. Hundreds of millions of messages kept in a database slow things down. I like it fast and am willing to search for NZB files for older things.

In the lower right of the main window there is indeed an estimate of how much longer the entire download queue will take to complete. I really like that a lot.

It is interesting that you cannot move things around anymore in the download window. I’ve always tended to queue things up in the order I want them downloaded anyway and since the pars appear to be conditionally downloaded (I’m still checking this out) I don’t need to manually move anything for any reason for myself. However, I do understand people wanting to sort by age if they are using NZB files of old posts about to drop off servers and they keep their queues huge.

All in all, for me personally, this is everything I’ve been wanting from Unison. The ability to delete headers with a selection and tapping the delete key is already saving me lots of time and not having to worry about purging messages to keep things snappy is going to be a blessing to the great majority of users.

So my heartfelt thanks. I use Unison more than any other application and have been doing so for years. I don’t mind paying for the software I actually end up using regularly and I had absolutely no problem with the upgrade fee. This is a major improvement and you have my appreciation.

Oops, that time remaining approximation is in the lower left corner of the main window, not the lower right.

Such a big improvement from the last version i had. Congrats on the great app i’ll be buying it ASAP!!

Keep up the good work & Best wishes

Really awesome, a Usenet server that accepts PayPal as payment! No more worrying about giving my credit card information to some enterprising hackers in a former Soviet Bloc country!

Unison 2 is a huge improvement from the first version and I was really hoping that it would stop me using Alt Binz under a Parallels virtual machine, but there are some key features that I just can’t do without. For example, the ability to schedule downloads is one of the main reasons I use AB, especially given that my ISP offers unlimited downloading between specific times of the day. To back up a couple of other comments made above, the ability to sort the items in the download queue by age/size is another feature that I use frequently. If these two things were implemented, I’d be $20 worse off and down a Parallels install!

I’ll buy it immediately ’cause I want to support the only decent Mac newsreader still around.
But I have the strong impression that Unison is geared exclusively toward file-downloading people. I cannot see any noteworthy feature for simple news-reading. For example a way to ignore or follow a thread. I hope to be wrong, I’ll have a more in-depth look at the new features, but so far I’m not too impressed.
However, I’m still hoping for improvements, and you will get my 18 bucks today.

SWEET! I’ve been waiting for this since Snow Leopard dropped!
THANK YOU!
THANK YOU!
THANK YOU!

This is AWESOME! I had no idea y’all were working on an update. I love Unison and can’t wait to peep the newness

I’m glad you guys finally added a KB/s counter for an entire group of downloads. Makes the app feel much faster. Thank you!

Did the price just go up from $25 to $29 today? I could have sworn it was cheaper yesterday when I was about to checkout… and it’s still listed as $25 on versiontracker.

First off… awesome work on the program. Amazing improvements.
any chance we might see the ability to re-size image previews? They currently open in a quicklook-like window, but can not be resized.
How about the ability to set rules to certain newsgroups to download into specific directories? ie… the ability to really categorize where content goes after being downloaded.
Also… is there a list of keyboard shortcuts anywhere?
Again… awesome improvements. I was happy to pay for the upgrade.

A divine joy to use! Worth every cent!! Thank you!!! I would like to see some way to add our own visual directory icons. But not complaining.

Brilliant. Updated wikipedia :0)

I can’t wait to try this. I’m a switcher and had used NewsRover which is very powerful but had a terrible interface. It was the only Windows app I was still running. Hoping this will allow me to cut the cord for good :-)

BTW – who’s the provider behind your Access service? I currently have Giganews and have been happy with them but wonder how your service compares.

^ Where’s the Erase button? I just bought & downloaded, fired it up, and there’s my aggregate indicator! AWESOME. You guys rock. :)

Great update. My compliments. Makes me happy :-)

I can’t retrieve more items; it won’t go past the “Grouping” stage.

Bought it just minutes after seeing it work very awesome release final Big improvements full speed my 120mbit without problems, only one question how can i do crossposts now?, in 1.81 it was easy just adding them in advanced options.

I think i just found out adding virtual groups and posting to then you can made crossposts to more than one group

Is version 2 Intel only? Works like a charm on Imac with Intel processor, hangs constantly on G5 Quad.

Hmm, Union 2 downloaded yesterday… trial expired today?! No matter, I’ll be buying an upgrade licence anyway.

If we already have a Unison Access account, will we automatically be upgraded to the new model?

Looks like a pretty cool app. But, the trial counter went from six days to zero in less than 24 hours? Whats up with that?

I was able to run the App for one day because in the past I had a demo version of 1.8.1. After running 1.8.1 for a few days, I finally got around to putting in my Purchase Key. It looks like Unison 2 is running off the same credentials because it assumed I had used my Unison demo for 6 days already.
I like the program, but I won’t be able to demo it properly and will hold off buying until necessary. 1.8.1 works fine for me for now.
From what I saw, it is solid.
My only constructive bit would be to include a built in nzb index search like Newsbin.com does with theirs.

Hi there,

As i already did, please add support for ‘jumping to the next group’ via the spacebar. Just like in MT-NewsWatcher, MacSOUP and even Thunderbird. Those newsreader have this feature. You can read all unread messages form all servers via the spacebar. Please also add support for showing the numbers of unread messages in a group from the groupslist. :-)

Disappointed… Where’s the “Header Compression, YENC XZVER support”?

Just wanted to say THANK YOU for creative the perfect usenet client. My favourite features in no particular order:

1. You finally made file grouping useful. Before, I always had to turn it off because I never really need PAR files unless my extraction went awry. Now, I can keep grouping on, select a group, download, and not worry about a thing. This is the way Mac software should be, and you guys are the best at it.

2. Automatic extraction and recovery. This save so much time, and it just makes sense to have it built in. I’ve already removed MacParDeluxe.

3. The newest messages/files separator. Before, I would highlight the newest message and hit Get Latest. That would be the only way to “accurately” know what’s newest. The addition of a separator makes this process more intuitive.

4. Total KB/s feedback. I actually used to love xnews on Windows. Even when using Unison 1.8~, I just kept thinking xnews was faster because I could never tell how fast Unison was downloading 19 files at a time. Now, I’m able to see I’m getting 2MB/s on the entire group. It just “feels” faster. Adding that feedback was one of simplest things you could do, yet it makes a world of a difference.

5. Single window design. This is NOW a real Mac app. The three windowed interface of 1.8 was just… bleh. I hated it.

Awesome job, Dave! I hope Unison 2 sales are THROUGH THE ROOF! It deserves as much success as possible!

Excellent upgrade for any user of the software. Polished UI for the most part – but what’s up with those non-standard (ugly) progress bars? My only other peeve so far is having the transfers not auto-“clear” themselves from the queue. I don’t like having to click “Clear List” so often to see how things are going.

Just tried the demo, and love it!
Gonna get my license in a minute ;)

Hello,

please make it possible that the Messages-view can be unthreaded again like in Unison 1.x! It’s not practical for everyone with this new threaded view…

thanks!

Overall 2.0 is a terrific upgrade, lots more positives than negatives. I was sufficiently impressed to have paid the upgrade fee before 2.0.1 was released .. enough said. BUT, there are a couple of features that disappeared in the upgrade that I miss, and that haven’t been mentioned by others, from what I could see.
1) I would love the ‘one window’ approach on my laptop, but on my 24″ iMac I miss the ability to open multiple newsgroups – I often like to open smaller newsgroups first and then have a larger, less frequently opened one opening in the background. That way I don’t sit there unproductively waiting 5 or 10 minutes for the big newsgroup to update it’s headers.
2) We no longer see in our list of saved newsgroups the number of new headers since the groups were last opened. Is there a setting I’m missing for this, or did the feature disappear?

Thanks, Steve

HOLY DAMN, I’ve been waiting a long time for this: the ability to jump to any point in a song preview rather than having to listen to it in real-time. I first requested that feature YEARS ago. I’m glad it’s finally in. Already purchased my upgrade license on the strength of that feature alone.

Thanks Panic and thank you Dave. You’ve made me a very happy customer yet again.

Just tried the demo and WOW – looks very neat. Nevertheless I’m a little bit confused. I started downloading quite a few nzb-files and closed Unison (Save Queue & Quit). After I started Unison again, the files magically vanished from the download queue. Any suggestions here?
Cheers
Mark

Love the new unison!
Have a trial for now but will buy once the trial is over.

Unison 2 is not unpacking the downloads properly. Always getting a “Error: Not enough recovery blocks, 1 more needed” then when I manually extract the archive it seems to be all there…hmmm. Msg’d support on this.

UNISON2: The font size of the messages is so small that I can hardly read it. How can I increase the font ?

Hello, is it 64bit, and support some of the new grand central stuff?

I quote Tim, the unthreaded view is a must-have for me. I bought it immediately to discover that it had one feature *less* than the previous version… Now I have to stick to 1.x!!! Please please reintroduce this option!

I have a request for enhancement. Can we not have the ability to put computer to sleep or shutdown after downloading, just like with Handbrake?

Very nice, but missing one pretty crucial feature in my eyes: the ability to unthread messages in a group. If I want to quickly mark everything up to a certain date as a read, I either need a searching filter that allows for that (show me all messages in the last 24 hrs, mark rest as read, or the like) or, to do it manually, one needs to be able to unthread so you can quickly find and mark read the date range you need. Please consider putting this in in an update?

First the goodness: the new product is a terrific upgrade. No doubt about it. I don’t see any more crash/lockup issues like with 1.x. I really like the new unified GUI design.

Now the downer:

Groups with large numbers of files are still not handled gracefully. I get the spinning beachball while the IO process is in work. Two improvements: show a progress bar during the IO/group load, and improve the multi-threading to allow continued operation while the IO is ongoing. Eliminate the beachballs altogether.

@Gene I think they’re working on a lot of these issues. Unison 2.0 is close to unusable on PPC for me because of all the lockups, even with the latest 2.0.3 release, but I am at least getting direct contact from the guys at Panic regarding updates and submitting application samples for them to track down the bottlenecks.

Ah, darnit, I plopped down $30 for 1.8 back in August, not too long before the cut-off for the upgrade. I’m just now getting to know all its features. Kinda sucks to have to buy it again so soon. $18 is less, yes, but I don’t feel like I’ve used my $30 worth yet. Sure wish there was a bit lower upgrade price for those of us who bought Unison in the last 6 months.

fabulous upgrade, I’m really enjoying it.
Now I am wondering if you have anything planned for Transmit!

Excellent upgrade, interface looks really polished now. Icon even nicer than before! Well done guys.

Unison for the iPad? What are the chances?

I’ve been putting U2 through its paces, and am very impressed. I’m finally going to be able to give Thoth a gold watch and retire him. Thank you Panic!

HOT DAMN, PANIC!

Just spent all evening checking out Usenet in Unison, and I don’t know how you’ve done it, but Usenet’s never been more interesting than when presented through Unison. I’m one of those strange beasts who still reads the groups as well as downloads, and Unison is about as close to perfect as a news client could be. The threading in the groups, the quoting of the text and colouring, the quick fades in and out from when you change views, all add up to incredible attention to detail and an experience never before seen on Usenet.

Also on the downloads, somehow Unison magically found an extra 100kbps of download speed I didn’t know I had (this is over SABnzbd+), which I won’t complain about, and while it doesn’t download the PAR2 files unless the file check fails, the whole PAR2/UnRar/Delete is totally seamless. In fact, the only single blemish I could find is a total non-issue: UnRar is noticeably slower than other clients, but as I say who really cares whether decompression is a little slower than normal? The point is that’s the *only* thing I could find that could be improved.

The only other thing that’s missing is closer integration to the Usenet ecosystem, outside of Usenet, again something I can’t blame Panic for not putting in this release given how much work has been put in already. For example, SABnzbd’s killer feature is because of Newzbin.com integration, so being able to a) search Newzbin, and b) download Newzbin bookmarks / RSS feeds for NZB files would really be the cherry on top.

But seriously, guys, well done. It’s freakin amazing stuff.

Loving it! As with all of Panics software its top notch both in design and function. Panic is one of those companies you can trust in enough to buy new products sight unseen.

One small feature request….actually make it a ONE window interface.
That is let me dock the activity window to the right side of the main window. I love the summary in the transfers tab but I like being able to see what files are actively downloading and how fast. PS love the operations tab. Dave is the Man.

Nice version with Unison 2. However, is there a way to automate the shutting down as soon as it’s finished downloading? That would be great. Thx

Unison 2 represents an awesome and sane way to deal with UseNet. The User Interface is beautiful and more importantly amazingly useable. Having worked on NewsFlash all those years ago, Unison represents everything a news client should be and more. Please buy it… it is worth it.

After sent first mail, now it isn’t possibile to reply to any message, mail window doesn’t appear.

Do you know what’s appening?

Unison for the iPad? Anyone…. Anyone….

A useful tip

I must reiterate Todd’s comment from January. I occasionally receive an error message from Unison 2 when attempting to join Rar files: “Error: Not enough recovery blocks, 1 more needed” . I revert to using UnRarX and everything joins and completes the final output file without issue. For me, this is a good enough stop-gap, but it would be nice to have Unison handle it for me.

@NickfromFrance, I’m also looking for the same option. Auto shutdown when finished downloading. Have you found a way to make Unison do that?

I wonder if it’s possible with a script… and someone already wrote it.. who knows…

Gr. Smoke123

I think there must be a bug somewhere as I have downloaded 12 (4-8gig) files and all 12 produced the “Error: Not enough recovery blocks, 600 more needed” of course sometimes its more or less than 600. I have downloaded about 30 files previously with only a couple files having this error.

Please help

Thanks

how do i cancel my unison-2 free trial period

thanks you

tracy

The best tool ever !
Looks nice and works perfectly. If you mainly have problems it often comes from the news provider :-)

Would be perfect to have a remote APP on a Ipad to launch the download while your not at home… Or just simply prepare the download and when you come home you plug your Ipad/Iphone and let’s rock !

I am not certain where you’re getting your info, however good topic. I needs to spend a while finding out much more or figuring out more. Thank you for great info I used to be looking for this information for my mission.

Hi,

I’m using Unison 2 and I’m having an issue. After it downloads eight or nine files individually, it won’t do anymore because it says I have an authentication error, even though I don’t have to sign in on my news server. Also, when I try to download multiple files, it says I don’t have enough recovery blocks. Can anybody help?

Thanks

I bought and installed Unison on my Mac some years ago and am very happy with it. I will upgrade to version 2 if I haven’t already done once I get home in Feb.
Because I travel a lot I cannot access my home pc…do you have a IPad version of Unison that I can get if not do you have any suggestions as to some compatible software that I can use on my iPad.
I would appreciate your suggestions
Thanks, Max