The transfer window appears when you’ve given Pineapple News instructions to download messages from or upload messages to your news server. It has three tabs: Progress, giving information about the currently executing action and the overall progress bar; Actions, which shows the list of queued actions waiting to be executed; and Errors, where failures are reported.
On the program’s Transfer menu is a sub-menu called Window. It contains three menu options that control the operation of the transfer window. The first is “Show,” which will cause the window to immediately appear onscreen if it isn’t already displayed. The second option is “Hide,” which will cause the window to disappear. (You can get the same result by clicking the window’s close button.) Hiding the window will not cancel any pending transfers. The final menu option is “Auto-Display,” which controls whether or not the window appears onscreen automatically at the start of a new transfer. If it’s checked, the window will come and go on its own. If it’s not checked, then the window will only appear if you specifically request it to by selecting the “Show” menu option, or if a transfer error occurs.
Progress The Progress tab has four fields that display information about the action currently being executed, and a progress indicator that shows overall progress for all current actions. This tab has one button, labeled “Clear All.” If clicked, then all pending actions will be removed from the network activity queue, including the one that is currently executing.
Actions The Actions tab allows you to view and control pending actions. The list of actions shown is updated in realtime, and is always up-to-date. The action in bold at the top of the list is the one currently executing.
Using the four buttons on this tab, you can re-order or remove actions. Note that if you remove or re-order the currently executing action, then the program’s connection to the server will be dropped and re-established. This is not a graceful action, and it will come as an abrupt surprise to the news server. Unfortunately, there is no better way to go about it, as the NNTP protocol has no provision for cancelling pending actions.
Errors The Errors tab will be made current whenever a transfer error occurs. It will contain more-or-less human-readable descriptions of what went wrong. Severe errors often cause all queued actions for the current server account to be removed. When an error occurs, the transfer window is forced onscreen, if it isn’t already. The transfer window will not automatically hide itself if the Errors tab contains any text. You can rectify that by pressing the “Clear All Errors” button.