What is BNR?

BNR is a news reader software specifically tailored for binary articles (articles from alt.binaries.* newsgroups, for example). The acronym BNR stands for "Binary News Reader" (when talking about BNR1), or for "Binary News Reaper" (when talking about BNR2. Confused? Didn't think so. :-)

BNR downloads and decodes binary 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. BNR will run on PC hardware running either Windows or Linux operating systems.

BNR is freeware but copyrighted, which means you are allowed to freely download and distribute it, as long as you don't pretend it was you who created it. :-). There is no warranty, BNR is provided "as is", so take appropriate precautions if you run BNR on a machine containing vital data. I shall not be held responsible whatever happens when you use BNR, etc... Okay, that's enough of the disclaimers.

Click on the image to view a 1024x768 screenshot of BNR2 in action.

Why yet another news reader?

The idea for BNR came from my growing 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.

Should I start using BNR?

That depends. If you have not downloaded binary articles from Usenet before, I would say "No". I have coded BNR with the assumption that the potential user has used a news client before and has a basic understanding of how Usenet works.

If you mostly read text messages and only occasionally download binary files, again there are other programs that will better suit your needs. BNR is not (and will not become) a good tool for reading text articles, as this is not what it was meant for.

If you often download MP3 files, movie files and other large binaries, and have subscribed to several news servers, then you should definitely give BNR a try! You are just the type of person BNR was created for. :-)

If you are somewhere in between the above extremes, feel free to give BNR a try, you might like it. If not, just delete it and continue using your current news reader.