Introduction

from the original BeOS version of the program

First off, thank you very much for trying my program. I worked really really hard on it.

I’ve been a USENET devotee for around five years now. Ever since it became important to me, I’ve always had, um ... “issues” with whatever newsreader I was using at the time, but nothing quite bad enough to motivate me to write my own. I knew it would be a big job. (That sounds so naive to me now. “A big job.” Sort of like the way that, say, New York is “a big city.”)

Meanwhile, the tactics of a certain large software company in the Northwest United States grew increasingly irksome to me over the years. They started out no worse than any other big company, but lately they’ve gotten so bad that I simply cannot continue to use their products with a clear conscience. It’s time to move on.

So now here I am a BeOS user, but I’ve got the same problem as all the rest of you: There’s no software! A decent reason to finally write my own newsreader.

And here it is! I bet I am more amazed than anybody at the mere fact of its existence. Writing it was so staggeringly complex and time-consuming that I can’t describe it. I don’t even want to know how many hours it took.

But ultimately, I guess it was worth it. I still have a long ways to go with this thing before it’s finished, but from now on it’s mine. If something annoys me about it, all I have to do is find the offending code, do the work, and recompile.

I hope you enjoy using the program as much as I do. I enjoy being a Pineapple News user immensely, but being a Pineapple News programmer is more of a mixed bag. You should enjoy using the program more than I do, since you didn’t have to go through the agony of writing it.

Allen Brunson
Coral Gables, Florida
August 16, 2000


Introduction to the Mac OS X Version

The BeOS version of Pineapple News was the biggest, most successful software project of my entire career. It got me hired at one of the most legendary tech firms in the history of computers: Be, Inc. Alas, seven months after I started, the company went out of business, its assets were sold to Palm Computing, and I got laid off.

After many trials and tribulations, false starts, and dead ends, I’ve finally got the program running on Mac OS X. Unfortunately I was unable to make use of very much of my original code, but all the original ideas have come across more or less intact. Which is another way of saying that I haven’t thought of any better newsreader paradigms in the intervening years, I guess. That’s a little programmer humor, folks.

I can’t see the future of course, but I hope that this version of Pineapple News will be as successful as the last one was, and that it will earn me a place in the Macintosh ecosystem.

Allen Brunson
Antioch, Tennessee
July 13, 2005

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