Introduction
BNR (Short for "Binary News Reader") is a news reader software specifically tailored for binary articles (articles from alt.binaries.* newsgroups, for example). BNR downloads and decodes the articles and saves them on your hard drive to the directory of your choice.
BNR can also download text articles, but other news readers are probably better suited to this task.
The idea for BNR came from my groving frustration with the newsreaders I used, namely WinVN and Microsoft's Outlook Express. I found that both of those programs had some major problems when downloading binary news articles. I was also looking for a small (as I thought at the time) project to improve my knowledge of Borland's Delphi environment. After I got the basic program working, I started using it instead of those aforementioned programs when downloading binary articles, and began adding new features as I went along.
BNR has some features which might be rather unique (at least I haven't seen another free news reader software that would have them, but this does not of course mean that such a program would not exist). Among those features are:
Support for multiple news servers simultaneously. This means that you can open a newsgroup, and BNR connects to all the news servers (which you have access to) that carry the newsgroup in question and downloads the headers of new articles. Thus you might be able to fully download a multi-part article even though none of the news servers has all the parts, as long as each part can be found in at least one of the servers.
Checking for file existence before you start downloading an article. BNR finds existing files on your hard disk and even on your removable disks (using a special database on your hard disk) so that you don't accidentally download a file you already have.
Finding an index file to decide whether to download an image. BNR can find and show an index file (for example, 1234hix1.jpg) when you select an article with a filename like 1234h12.jpg and click "Find index...".
Plugin support. If BNR lacks a feature you find important, you can extend the capabilities of BNR by writing plugins.
Header download optimization. To save time using a slow connection (modem, for example) BNR downloads only the minimum amount of header data. You may even decide to leave out stuff like article authors, article dates, etc. The only required headers are the article subjects (so you know what the article contains), article sizes (so you know how long the download would take) and message IDs (so BNR can match the same article on several news servers).
Article download optimization. BNR only downloads the article body, and all articles are downloaded in the order they would expire on the news server in question. If the same article exists on several servers, BNR will use the fastest available server.
Connect-on-demand. You don't need to be connected to the news servers all the time, only while you are downloading article headers or the articles themselves. BNR knows this, and automatically disconnects and reconnects when necessary.
BNR has many of the standard features of news readers, for example:
Caching of article headers. You can mark a group of articles, and later decide you don't want to download all of them now. You can disconnect from the servers and exit BNR, and when you restart BNR at some later time, BNR will start downloading those articles you marked for download.
Internal JPEG viewer. You can doubleclick on an existing filename, and BNR will display the image.
Automatic multi-part article combining and completeness checking. You don't need to manually attempt to find all the parts by looking at the subjects, BNR does this for you. BNR also checks that all parts for the multi-part articles are available so you can decide whether you want to download the articles.
Multiple Document Interface. BNR is a MDI software, which means you can have several views to the same data. You can for example open the same newsgroup several times, viewing the new articles on one window and downloaded articles on another window.
Newsgroup-specific settings. Most of the settings of BNR can be made different for different newsgroups. You might for example want to download JPEG images to one directory and MP3 files to a different directory. You might also want to have different removable drive databases for these two file types, in case you have separate CD-Rs for JPEGs and MP3 files.
BNR does not support reply threads. BNR is a BINARY news reader and is not meant to be used for following discussions.
BNR does not support article posting. You need to use a different program if you wish to post articles or binary files.
The latest version of BNR can be found from the BNR homepage: http://www.co.jyu.fi/~ap/bnr.html
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