Main Form

The main form of BNR consists of four areas; Menu Bar, Tool Bar, Client Area and Status Bar.

Menu Bar

The Menu Bar always contains at least three items, plus some additional items depending on the active form within the client area. The always available menu items are File, Window and Help.

File

File menu contains three items, Show Config, Directory Scanner and Exit. With Show Config you can toggle the configuration form visibility on and off. With Exit you can exit BNR.

Window

Window menu contains commands to Cascade, Tile and Minimize All windows, plus a list of all open windows.

View

If the active window is an Article List window, this item opens the View Menu for this article list. This menu item is not always available.

Articles

If the active window is an Article List window, this item opens the Articles Menu for this article list. This menu item is not always available.

Help

Help menu has two items, Contents and About. With Contents you can go directly to help contents, and with About you can view some information about BNR, including the current memory usage.

Tool Bar

Below the Menu Bar is a Tool Bar, which looks something like this:

The Tool Bar has four separate areas:

• The first area consists of buttons for showing only New articles and for showing only articles with Files (actually filenames). These work as toggles and can be turned on and off by clicking on the button. These buttons are only available if the currently active window is an Article List window.
• The second area has buttons for selecting the view mode of the currently active Article List window. All of these view modes can be combined with the New button to show only New Marked or New Downloaded articles, for example. These buttons are only available for Article List windows.
• Next there is a field that allows you to type a filter string that will be used to show only articles whose Subject or Filename contain this string. Note that you cannot use wildcards here, if you type an asterisk (*) into this field, you only get articles that have an asterisk in their Subject or Filename. You can go back to the Article List window by pressing Tab or by clicking on the Article List window.

• The last area consists of a button for Configuration Form and buttons corresponding to the currently opened Article List windows (up to 10 buttons are available, if you have more than 10 article list windows open only the first 10 will have buttons here). You can go directly to a window by clicking the corresponding button here.

 

 

Client Area

 

The configuration window and all article list windows (together with article text windows and JPEG image windows) reside within the client area of the main form.

 

Status Bar

 

The Status Bar shows the total number of articles marked for download and the status of each of the configured servers. For example, the image below shows four articles left to download, one of which is currently downloading from server "Newsguy". Two other servers have been configured, "Kolumbus" which is currently unavailable and "Inet" which is currently not connected.

 

 

 

When BNR is working in the background the statusbar information is shown on the taskbar button. For example, in the image below three articles are to be downloaded. The first configured server has downloaded 20 kilobytes of one of the articles, the second server is unavailable and the third is in a disconnected state.

 

 

 

 

 




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