NewsBin Pro 3.3 Thumbnail Bar

The Thumbnail Bar displays thumbnails of images that NewsBin is downloading.  In the 3.3 version, only .jpg files are supported.  The Thumbnail Bar also is home to the Connection control, Kill button, and Progress Bars.  The Alt-1 Keystroke shows or hides this bar, the Alt-6 keystroke hides the thumbnails but still shows the Connection control, Kill buttons, and progress bars.  The Thumbnail bar can be moved around on the NewsBin screen and can be detached as placed outside the NewsBin screen.  This is accomplished by clicking on the area to the left of the bar (under the small "x") and dragging to wherever you want the bar to be.

The Connection control allows you to specify the number of simultaneous connections NewsBin should use when downloading binaries.  NewsBin supports up to 8 simultaneous connections for downloading binaries.  An additional connection is used for downloading headers or for posting to the newsgroups.

The Kill button allows you to terminate any download currently in progress.  When you kill a download, it is placed in NewsBin's list of items already downloaded because it assumes that if you kill it, you never want to see it again.  If you decide you want to download this file in the future, you will have to use the Force Download option after finding the post by selecting "Show Filtered" in the Post List.

The area to the right of each Kill button is the progress bar.  The bar fills from left to right as the binary data is downloaded.  The number of bytes downloaded is displayed and updated in the center of the bar.  If your machine is working hard keeping up on a high bandwidth connection, updates to the bar will happen less frequently because it is considered a low priority task.  If you want to force the bars to display more frequently, waving the cursor over the bars will force an update.

The Thumbnail windows themselves progressively display each image as it is downloaded.  Thumbnails can be viewed in two different resolutions, high and low.  High resolution shows all the pixel information and, if the thumnbnail bar is expanded, will show the full quality of the image.  Low resolution reduces the number of pixels shown and uses fewer resources.  On a high bandwidth connection, you will actually improve your download datarate by running in low resolution mode.  High or low resolution modes are selected from the "Options" button on the toolbar and then selecting the "Switches" tab.

To achieve the highest performance for downloads, use Alt-6 to suppress displaying thumbnails.

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