Absolutely not! NewsDart is free and we encourage you to tell your friends, family, and co-workers.

It is very easy to add your own news sources. The simplest method is to choose the custom button from the news sources page and to import the URL from an open browser window (click the import button). You then click the add button to add it to the custom URL list.

If you would like to organize categories within your news source and have them selectable, you may directly modify the "sources.txt" file. This approach has the added benefit of being able to share your sources with others.

If you are interested in news for a particular sports team, you should specify the city as a separate keyword group as opposed to combining it with the team name. For example, if you are interested in the "Washington Redskins", you should create a keyword group that is "+redskins" and one that is "+washington".

The basic philosophy should be to be as general as possible, and if you get too many non-related hits then scale it back to be more specific. For example, if you are interested in ACC College basketball, start first with a keyword of "+acc". If this results in receiving too many articles that are unrelated to basketball (could be football hits), then change the keyword group to "+acc+basketball" or "+acc+court". You can also exclude items: "+acc-football" as an alternative.

We use the term "alpha" to represent a product version that has had all its major features tested, and had been verified to work on a small subset of hardware configurations. When a product first enters the alpha stage, there are typically no known problems but we expect that as people try it out they may identify problems associated with their particular computer configuration. This information is invaluable to us in order to ensure that the program can be quickly updated to resolve any incompatability problems found by our users. Problems reported by our users will be posted on this web-site.

We are very interested in your feedback, so please contact us if you encounter a problem. We are very responsive!

Our plan is to release a Beta version of the product once we have resolved all problems identified in feedback received from a sufficient number of alpha-users. At the moment we expect the Beta version to be available in March 2000.

The Beta period will probably last no more than two months where hopefully we will attract a larger volume of users that can validate the functionality and reliability of the program.

Absolutely. NewsDart utilizes a generic parsing and search engine and can be used to find articles on any news topic. It can also be used to search through online auction sites to alert you of items you are interested in. Try it out! Let us know how you have decided to used the program!

Check out how you can organize your own source list. You can then post your source list on our web-site so others can download it. Alternatively, you can send the "sources.txt" file in your main NewsDart directory directly to your friend as an e:mail attachment.

If have added custom sources without modifying the sources.txt file, you can still exchange them with your friends by sending them the "config.txt" file instead.

Yes, the connections tab allows you to enter information about your proxy. Contact your system administrator to find out what "server" and "port" you should use if you do not already know it. Keep in mind that most workstations are setup so that the browser you use (Internet Explorer, or Netscape) is also setup to use a proxy, check those settings out first.

You may also need to enter a "user name" and "password" if your administrator restricts individual access (this is fairly rare, but does happen). You will need to contact your administrator for assistance in order to know what name and password to enter (you can always try to enter your standard network name and password as a first try, can't hurt).

Yes. We have tuned NewsDart so that it utilizes a minimum amount of memory and CPU power, it should not interfere at all with other applications. It also knows when you have logged off and will automatically re-check the news sources in your list the next time you log into the Internet.