Thoth 2.0 does exist. It’s a significant overhaul of Thoth 1.x. It’s an OS X only application, and all the various file and memory related parts of the code were modified to perform best on OS X. It’s also developed under Apple’s Xcode, and already has all the changes I know to make to permit creating a universal or Intel version. But I don’t have an Intel Mac, just a second generation dual G5 desktop, so I can’t yet really compile and test an Intel version. The program is code-complete and has gotten a fair amount of testing on my G5 machine, but some more testing would be needed before release.

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in Thoth 2 was to make it easier to use and manage filters and newsgroup settings, to eliminate the overlap between preferences and newsgroup settings, and to let people accomplish more with many fewer newsgroup settings or filter groups. There are various other changes as well, some cosmetic as in the use of sheet dialogs were that makes sense and non-button style icons in window toolbars, etc.

Thoth 1.8 also exists. It’s effectively the next revision of Thoth 1.7 that was never released. The revision history for it is as follows:
1. 8.0

• The OS X only version of Thoth now offers spelling checking for message windows. In message windows misspelled words can optionally be displayed in a distinct color and underlined (similar to URL styling, and enabled or disabled the same way in the ³Fonts and Styles² pane of Preferences) to make them more obvious. When a single misspelled word is selected and there are guesses available, the contextual menu will have a submenu listing the guesses to paste in to correct the spelling. The Messages pane of the Preferences and Newsgroup Settings dialogs now allow you to set the default spelling check language for message windows. That setting, along with the one to display misspelled text in a distinct color and underlined, can also be adjusted for individual open message windows via the ³Message Options² dialog opened via the appropriate toolbar button.
• Added support for SMTP authentication (PLAIN and CRAM- MD5 methods). Note that for mail sending to work, you probably must specify a valid email address for your email address (which you’d want to do for a private email message anyway) and not one that ends in .invalid or which is otherwise invalid or nonexistent. Note that mac.com will reject email if the From address isn’t your mac.com email address. Other SMTP servers may impose comparable rules.
• Tried to work around an OS X bug with drawing checkmark and other special system symbols on non-Roman systems.
• Fixed a problem with the column formatting of the thread view in article list windows.
• Added detection and support for JPEG2000 image files (viewable only under OS X with QuickTime 6). JPEG2000 images may not display correctly due to possible problems with non-standards compliance by the encoding application or QuickTime, since JPEG2000 is a new and evolving standard.
• The View menu Resort command can now be used with the Queued Transfers List to re-sort items alphabetically by the name of the article being downloaded or posted. Holding down the shift key resorts only the selected items. Holding down the option key causes reverse order sorting. This command was also added to the contextual menu for the Queued Transfers List window.
• When using the option to add new binaries to extract to the top of the Queued Transfers list (by holding down the shift key), the items are now added in such a way that their order in the article list window is maintained. Previously, since each item in succession was added to the then-top of the list, the newly added items would appear in the reverse order of how they were shown in the article list window.
• Fixed a problem with background window updates when editing a filter from the ³Matching Filters² window.
• Added ³Show Post Info² command to Special menu for article list windows to display a text window with header information for the selected posts. This is similar to the Export command, except the headers are shown in a text window as they would appear in the original posts, in a more human readable form that the tab-delimited table of data produced by the Export command. The main keyboard short for this new command is ‘h.’ This command was also added to the contextual menu for article list windows.
• Modified the ‘m’ shortcut key to also work in locked size image windows to change the magnification so that the image is as large as possible (while not zooming the window larger as is done with non-locked windows).
• Added Date and Newsgroups headers to the post information text (optionally) saved with extracted binaries.
• Changed how decoder and queued transfer error sounds are played to try to work around an OS bug that sometimes causes crashes when playing the sounds.
• Fixed a bug that erroneously caused filter actions to be done for article list windows opened from a search window (they should only be done for article list windows opened from a subscribed group list window).
• It is now possible to set a long ³Expire Active Connections After² value to deal with news servers that abruptly close connections that have been open and active a long time.
• If the connection to the news server is lost while downloading a binary attachment, an attempt to try again with a new connection is now done automatically.
• After clicking on the Reset button in the Statistics pane of the ³News Server Settings² dialog, the displayed start date wasn’t updated to reflect the change. Fixed.
• Shift- clicking in an image window now works like Ptah to create a selection rectangle that can then be used to change the magnification of the image to make the rectangle fill the window, etc. Previously the change in magnification would happen immediately as soon as the shift-click and drag was completed.
• Added a work- around for the changed behavior of the Drag Manager in OS X
• 10. 3 that causes TrackDrag to block when the mouse is not moved, which interfered with dragging something to the top of bottom of a view and having the view autoscroll unless the mouse was constantly wiggled.
• Modified how Date headers are parsed to handle the most common forms of non-RFC compliance. When filtering on dates it is now possible to specify a filter that just matches such bad dates without also specifying that the post be older or newer than a specified number of days. With these changes it’s still possible to filter on bad dates (most often found in posts by spammers) while still showing a date (instead of a question mark) in article list windows.
• Renamed ³matches the pattern² style live filtering and group Find searches to ³starts with the pattern² to more clearly indicate what it is supposed to do, and added the similar ³contains the pattern² style live filtering and Find searches. Also, formerly if a newsgroup didn’t match the pattern but did include the pattern in literal form as part of its name, that group would count as a match (i.e. if the pattern was ³a.b² then both ³aaa.bbb.ccc² and ³xxa.bbb.ccc² would match, as the first matches the pattern, and the second name contains it as part of its name). This is no longer the case, since it was inconsistent and would lead to unwanted matches, and because the ³contains the string² option is available when this type of matching is desired.
• Fixed a problem in how sorting reply threads by subject was performed and also ensured than in non-threaded mode replies will follow non-replies with the same subject.
• When editing multiple selected filters in the filters list window, if the expiration settings for a filter are changed, the filter will now also be unexpired if it was previously expired by removing the leading ” character from the filter group name. This means it’s now easy to batch unexpirations of filters (if the option to keep expired filters is enabled, and you find that you wish to again use some expired filters. When editing a single expired filter, it is still necessary to manually change the filter group name to remove the leading ” to unexpire the filter.
• Added support for new “smooth scrolling” scrollwheels and trackpads that send a new, different mouse scroll event to applications. Also modified the old-style scrollwheel support. Now, for both types of scrollwheels, holding down the control key while scrolling will accelerate scrolling by a factor of 4 (previously the option key was used for scrollwheel acceleration). Holding down the option key while using the scrollwheel now acts the same as holding down the option key while clicking in the scrollbar arrow buttons, typically causing page by page scrolling.
• Added a graphical tree display to the thread list in article windows (when reference threading is enabled). This works with the indenting to help show the relationship of the various posts in the thread, as does the preexisting feature of bolding the parent and child posts for the currently displayed thread. Also, since a single-click is always used to choose a new post from the thread list, which is always drawn selected in the list, the asterisk that was formerly used to indicate the current post in the list is no longer drawn.