Tuesday, August 9th, 2005, 8:18 am
New Yanoff Newsreader
Filed under: 
lames have recently been thrown due to confessions about bad experiences with New Yanoff. New Yanoff is the successor of Yanoff, which is the well-known newsgroups reader for the Palm platform.
Let us begin with compatibility issues. New Yanoff is not compatible with some recent models of the Palm such as the LifeDrive.
Secondly, the user interface of the trial version ($24 for the registered version) is filled with many nags. It is understandable given the purpose of this trial package. Nevertheless, nags were claimed to be excessive.
On to more major flaws, the user interface is relatively unprofessional, as indicated in a Yanoff 3.0 review. Below is one screenshot that has been borrowed from this review.
Example of bad UI design
Finally, the default signature for sent messages bears citations from the bible. It works this way by default and gives no warning and indication that this is happening. To some this will be no cause for concern, but religion, much like politics, is a sensitive issue to many. This is in fact the point which initiated the flames in nntp://comp.sys.palmtops. The developer strongly defended his choice to “spread the gospel” (exact quote), which is a very controversial step among most developers (imposition of the developer’s views).
As the discussion developed, New Yanoff turned out to be a relatively disappointing piece of software that is not sufficiently reliable. GPL Yanoff, which is of course free, can still be downloaded from its Sourceforge Web site.
Cited by: PalmAddict
September 15th, 2005 at 9:38 pm
Version 3.1 is out and fixes all new hardware incompatabilities. There are many, many, many UI improvements and bug fixes. The perfectly safe, perfectly reasonable default signature remains.
P.S. Please look up the meaning of the word “impose”.