SABnzbd v0.4.8 was released a week or so ago on their official site. The list of bug fixes includes:

Fixed various par2-repair problems for OSX

Solved long queue display problem for OSX

Fixed news-group and newzbin-category to SABnzbd-category conversion

The only real issue I have experienced with this app is the long queue display problem in OSX. With an NZB queue of over 400 items Safari would become somewhat unresponsive when changing the post processing script and Firefox would become pretty much unuseable. With 0.4.8 those issues seem to have disappeared and once again the universe is correctly aligned.

With Unison and NZBdrop seemingly lacking development there doesn’t appear to be much competition out there for SABnzbd who are making the best app right now. Unison hasn’t released an update to 1.8.1 in over a year and the NZBdrop developers are somewhat unresponsive to emails, don’t approve posts on their blog etc. Check out SABnzbd 0.4.8 if you’re looking for a new NZB app on OSX. I can tell from the apache logs on this web server that alot of you are!

From the official site:

I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of NZB Drop 1.3. This release offers significant performance improvements, bug fixes, and several highly requested new features.

This is a free upgrade. All registered users running Leopard are encouraged to upgrade to this new version.

Significant changes include:

- Reduced cpu usage and disk activity
- Watch folder for auto-loading nzb files
- Bandwidth limit scheduling
- Separate pref to auto-queue par checksum files
- New command to sort file list
- New “manual only” server setting
- Many other minor changes and bug fixes
- Requires X.5 Leopard

The reduced CPU activity is definitely a plus. Before 1.3 all versions would pretty much use 100% CPU while having 1 or 2 connections open. The auto-watch folder for NZBs is also good (when it works). The only bugs I have found so far:

And it still has multiple windows, wtf? I guess i’ll be sticking with SABnzbd for now. Maybe the altbinz guys could port that app over to OSX.

After my last rant on a good NNTP/NZB client for OSX (which can be read here) I came across a new client called NNTPGrab. The client is developed using GTK and is cross-platform between Win32/Linux/OSX. From its official site, the features include:

Possibility to run the GUI on a different computer than where the downloads are happening

Right now the client is really only lacking one main feature (bandwidth limiting, planned for v0.6) and even though NNTPGrab is coded in GTK, it still appears to be better than NZBDrop and Usenet, which both are severely lacking in terms of the development lifecycle (Unison released Feb 08, NZBDrop released Sept 08). While I won’t be using this until the bandwidth limiting feature is implemented, this application is showing alot of promise and will be something to keep an eye on.

Being a user of Mac OSX for a while now (coming from a windows & unix backgroound) I have been trying to do things “the apple way” instead of resorting to using unix or windows (via crossover) apps to get the job done. On windows for usenet (mainly NZB) I would use either newsleecher or altbinz to get what I wanted, on linux it has been hellanzb and sabnzbd+. On OSX there are not too many choices for usenet, and what choices there are seem to be lacking in features quite heavily.

hellaNZB and SABnzbd+ on OSX work fine, however these are run from the terminal. Both have a web interface available (hellanzb’s is optional, although managing downloads from the cmdline is daunting when you have 100-200 in the queue) however with alot of NZBs loaded both become a hog of system resources. Firefox on OSX will repeatedly hang or crash when browsing the SABnzbd+ queue. Safari will work, however leaving the browser open for 15-20mins will cause your macbook to sound like a jet  engine is inside.

This brings me to the NZB/Usenet apps available on OSX, which are NZBDrop and Unison. Both will download articles from Usenet fine, however they lack the features of NZB clients on the other OS’s (altbinz, newsleecher, hellanzb, sabdnzbd+). After using both for roughly a week, the issues I have with the clients are:

1. Settings are sometimes reset to defaults and need to be reconfigured (NZBDrop)
2. Articles in the NZB file are loaded individually, not displayed as one (like hellanzb, sabnzbd+, many torrent clients). If I have a download running, I do not want to see all of the individual files only an indicator of the overall progress). (Both)
3. Configuring multiple connections for a download will download multiple files, instead of using multiple connections for one file (Unison)
4. Download rate limiting is per connection, not overall (Unison)
5. No option to automatically check par files (Both require MacPAR Deluxe for this task)
6. No option to automatically extract files from archives (As above)
7. No option to automatically delete .nzb file once download is complete
8. Multiple windows for each NZB. If you have multiple NZBs loaded it becomes a hassle to manage (NZBdrop)
9. No download scheduler (Both)

Any client which has all of those features I would gladly pay a bit of money for. Until then, i’ll keep looking!