Thoth news

I quickly put together this site to relay some of the information I gathered on Thoth 1.8 and on the development of Thoth 2.0.

I recently exchanged a few e-mails with Brian Clark, the author of the newsreader Thoth. For those of you who don’t know Thoth, it is a news-reader derived from NewsWatcher, then YA-NewsWatcher (just like VA-NewsWatcher and MT-NewsWatcher). Thoth was shareware.

A while ago (maybe two years??) Brian stopped developing Thoth because of various factor (including the loss of revenue related to piracy:
hard to survive out there, code and pay the Web-Hosting bill if people use the app without ever getting a license). Since then, the app hasn’t been available at all.
It looks like Biran could be ready to work on Thoth again, but the cost of developing the app, hosting it on a server, etc, makes him wonder whether it really is worth it.

He has a version 1.8 on the work and a version 2 is also planned and the few screen captures for various new ideas he has for v2 looked
pretty nice to me 🙂 ).

v1.8 brings various improvements, including in regard to spell-checking (and it allows you to chose the language to spell-check in depending on the newsgroup… pretty good for people like me 🙂 and v2 looks like a complete revamping of the app: Preferences management for instance are regrouped in a nice pane making it much easier to access everything (a lot of people have been complaining in the past about the fact that preferences were hard to deal with in Thoth).

I don’t know how/when new versions will be made available. I don’t know what will be free updates and what will be paid upgrades (and I’m not sure Brian’s mind is quite set on that yet) so this is mostly a poll to find out whether people would be interested to see Thoth development start again.

If you want a v1.8 or 2… of Thoth to ever see the light of day, simply send an e-mail to Brian at thoth-help@earthlink… to let him know so that he can figure out roughly how many people are interested. In the meanwhile, I’ll try to post here the information I gathered on Thoth 1.8 and on the development of Thoth 2.0.