Most-Requested Enhancements

We're committed to making our Agent products the very best newsreaders available. We made beta versions freely available for months before the 1.0 release so that we could get the widest possible exposure to the Usenet community, and we took the suggestions (and the occasional complaint) very seriously. We have already incorporated many of them, and the product is much better because of the input we got. Future versions of the software will address as many of the remaining items as possible. Here are the hot topics that we've seen in our in-box:

ARTICLE DOWNLOAD PROGRESS INDICATOR: We currently display a progress indicator when downloading the newsgroup list or the article headers for a group, but people who download large articles have also requested that we display this when downloading an individual article.
IMPROVED NAVIGATION FUNCTIONS: One of the more challenging design problems was identifying the various ways that people would want to move from article to article and from group to group. There are many combinations of moving to the next article or the next unread article, in the current thread or the current newsgroup or the entire list of subscribed newsgroups, viewing or not viewing the destination article, etc. We provided what we thought was the best set of commands for this, but people with different browsing styles are asking for changes and enhancements. Our current beta release contains some of the improvements that people requested, but we know we have more fine-tuning to do here.
SCHEDULED ACTIONS: Several people have asked for the ability to schedule retrieval operations to take place at predefined times. This would allow you to do things like retrieve the headers for all your subscribed groups shortly before you arrived for work in the morning, so that they'd be waiting for you when you got there.
MULTIPLE SUBSCRIPTION LISTS / GROUPS OF NEWSGROUPS: A number of people have asked for ways to organize their newsgroup lists. The requests differ in detail, but the general theme is that they read news at different times in different modes (business vs. personal, for example), and want corresponding ways to group their subscribed newsgroup list. One idea is to have multiple subscription lists, so that you could retrieve headers for a specific subset of the groups you follow.
CUSTOMIZABLE TOOLBAR: We've had a number of requests for a user-customizable toolbar, where you could choose which buttons appeared and perhaps map a set of keystroke commands to a key. This might also help solve the navigation quandry mentioned above.
MORE STATUS DISPLAYS: People have asked for a variety of additional information to be displayed in various places in the program: the total number of articles in a group; the total number of newsgroups in the group list; the date the newsgroup list was last updated; and indicators for new articles in addition to unread articles.
GLOBAL SEARCH: You can search all of the article titles in a newsgroup, or all of the text in an article, but there's currently no way to search the text in all articles in a newsgroup (or even multiple newsgroups).
BETTER NEWSGROUP NAME SEARCH: Several people have suggested improvements here, including progressive search or some other way to filter groups by name.
ENHANCED PRINTING FEATURES: These include printing group and/or article header lists, printing selected text instead of the full article, and being able to add customizable titles to a printout.
AUDIBLE ALERTS: Some operations take a long time to complete, especially when you're using Agent in offline mode. If you could configure it to sound an audible alert when it finished, you wouldn't have to constantly monitor it to see if it had finished.
UNDO: We've had requests for an Undo option in several places: in the article editor, when deleting a message or a group, when mass-marking articles read or unread, etc.
CONFIGURABLE STARTUP ACTIONS: Several people have asked for the ability to have Agent automatically perform some action whenever it was started (go online and download new headers, for example). We're thinking about adding command-line options to control this, which would then allow you to have multiple icons on your desktop that did different things when you ran them.
REMINDER FOR PENDING OPERATIONS: Because Agent can operate offline, it allows you to create articles and email messages and queue them to be sent at a later time. Some users have said that it would be nice to be reminded whenever they closed Agent with messages waiting to be sent.
MORE OUTBOX FUNCTIONALITY: People have asked for a variety of added features in the Outbox, including printing and saving messages to a text file, an easy method of creating a copy of an Outbox item, and different sorting capabilities.
EDITOR ENHANCEMENTS: These include an insert/overwrite toggle; various shortcuts such as double-clicking to select a word, Control-Delete to delete an entire word, and Control-Backspace to delete the previous word; displaying the signature in the composition window; allowing indentation without line breaks; and linking the editor to the user's word processor or text editor of choice.

We are actively evaluating all of these ideas for possible inclusion in future releases. We will keep this list up to date as we receive new suggestions and as we decide their disposition.

Remember that this list is just the ideas that have been widely requested; it isn't a complete list of every feature that may be added to the product. We frequently get ideas from only one or two people that turn out to be worth implementing, so don't assume that a particular feature will never be added just because it isn't on this list.

Commercial Features

Besides the enhancements listed above, we've received a number of requests for features that we're already planning to include in our commercial Agent product. Check our Agent page for a list of those features.