The battle was hard-fought and indeed, I tried to stick by Panic.com’s Unison for as long as I could, but eventually I had to give in, and I proclaim the prominence and sing the virtues of a new Newsgroup Binary Client for every platform – SABnzbd.

If you download Binaries from the NNTP, be it newest Linux distros or what have you, on a regular basis, there is rather a limited field of OSX clients worthy of mention. I rigidly stood by Unison for the longest time. However, it seems that the developers at Panic have lost all interest in updating this App. It has a number of issues on Snow Leopard, and the fact that it doesn’t do any PAR correction or UnRAR operations, makes it a half-client. On Windows, one is set – Newzleecher will do that and more. For the longest time, I searched high and low for a replacement for Newzleecher on OSX. I thought Unison was it, that is, till I came upon SABnzbd.

It does it all, and then some more. I couldn’t begin to enumerate the features of this App, which runs as a server. This means, I can connect to it from my iPhone, or in essence, from anywhere in the world (via Dynamic DNS). I can configure an RSS feed from a multitude of sites, and tell the App to monitor it for anything that shows up, and conforms to a list of keywords I have configured. It will then, automatically download, unpar, unrar AND delete the RAR and PAR files. Oh sweet! I have just started to scratch the surface of what this App is capable of. More to come! Check this App out – best of all, it is Open Source and therefore – FREE!