Pineapple News requires Mac OS X version 10.3.0 or later. It also needs a working connection to the internet via analog modem, DSL, cable modem, direct T1, or equivalent, and account information for an NNTP news server.
If you don’t have an NNTP account, you can purchase one from Newsguy, news.individual.net, or many other vendors. If you’re short on cash, there are a lot of free special-purpose NNTP servers spread out all over the ’net you can make use of, many of which are listed here.
There isn’t much to installing Pineapple News. Uncompress the archive it came in, which will likely happen automatically during download. Drag the program to your Applications folder, or wherever else you would like it to go. There, you’re done.
When first executed, Pineapple News will notice that it’s missing some stuff it needs to run, and will go about creating it. It will put up a dialog box directing you to the help pages and begin insinuating itself into your system. The program will create a new folder called:
/Users/[yourname]/Library/PineappleData
and several sub-folders, which is where it will store its article data. If you would prefer to use a different folder, you can select a new one in the program’s Preferences window.
If you decide to stop using the program, you can remove every trace that it ever existed on your computer by following the instructions in the the help topic Uninstalling Pineapple News.
Say you’ve just downloaded the latest version of Pineapple News, but you’ve already got an older version installed. For all versions thus far, this has been a painless task. Simply throw away your existing copy of the program and put the new one in its place. It will retain all your existing settings and message files.
Sometime in the future, I may have to break backward compatibility slightly, but I doubt it. If I do, the program will have some way of alerting you to the potential pitfalls.