Awasu Personal Edition v1.1.2 (beta)

UPDATE: This beta has expired. Please check the releases page for information about the latest releases.

IMPORTANT: This is a beta release. Some features may not be complete and the software may be unstable. Install at your own risk! You may need to do some basic computer maintenance tasks to get this release to run.

If you have purchased the Advanced Edition and would like to use this beta, please contact us and we'll send you a copy.

Installation

The installation procedure depends on which version of Awasu you currently have:

• If you already have Awasu 1.1.1 beta

  Unpack this zip on top of your existing files: Awasu-PersonalEdition-v1.1.2.zip
  
  

• If you already have Awasu 1.1
  • Unpack this zip on top of your existing files: Awasu-PersonalEdition-v1.1.2.zip
  • You also need to download and unpack bcg61u.zip and mfc42u.zip.
  • Run upgrade.exe (in the Awasu installation directory). This can take several minutes depending on how fast your machine is and how many channels you have but you will be told when it is done. Please be patient!
  
  
• If you already have any other version

  Please upgrade to Awasu 1.1 first and run it at least once. Then follow the instructions above.
  
  

• If this is the first time you are installing Awasu

  Please install Awasu 1.1 first and run it at least once. Then follow the instructions above.
  

Major new features

• Added the ability to search your feeds (Edit, Find).
  
  
• Implemented auto-discovery. This allows Awasu to automatically detect if a web page is advertising an RSS feed. If you want to have a play with this feature or want to know how it works, open this page in the new version of Awasu.
  
  
• Added support for Dublin Core, xhtml:body and content:encoded. These are alternative ways for a channel to provide its content so you will probably see a lot more stuff in your feeds now.
  
  
• The display of channel content has been made much more configurable. You can control which feed items are shown (e.g. unread or new items only) and also how they are presented. You can also easily switch templates to completely change the appearance of the channel summary pages. Full details are here.
  
  
• Channel summaries now show when each feed item was published (or received if a publish date/time was not provided). This will only be available for feed items that are received after you upgrade to this version.
  
  
• Optimized the way channel feeds are downloaded from the Internet. They are retrieved much faster now and doing manual channel updates from the UI is also more responsive.
  
  
• Changed the way Awasu handles channels that have update errors. If a channel gets 3 consecutive errors, it is shown in the My Channels window in red and is updated once every 6 hours until it updates successfully. Manual updates can still be done.
  
  
• Awasu now handles unescaped ampersands in feeds. This is by far the most common cause of feed errors and will automatically be fixed up.
  
  
• Added support for secure channels using SSL i.e. URL's that start with https://.
  
  

Minor features and bug fixes

• Optimized the way channel windows are opened and updated. Opening windows is noticeably faster now.
  
  
• Optimized the way the Program Options and Channel Properties dialogs are saved.
  
  
• Improved the way channels are loaded when Awasu starts (especially if you have a lot of channels).
  
  
• Changed the way notification balloons are configured. They can also be disabled at startup which is useful if you have a lot of channels since you can get a lot of them when Awasu is first started and it can take a while to get through them all.
  
  
• Balloon positioning now takes into account non-standard taskbar positioning i.e. at the top, left or right of the screen.
  
  
• Awasu can be configured to check for an Internet connection and skip channel updates if one is not detected (Program Options, Advanced). If this is turned on, Awasu will also wait (for up to a minute) for a connection when it starts.
  
  
• All channel config files now have a .CHANNEL extension. The directory structure has also been cleaned up.
  
  
• Worked around a situation where the embedded IE browser would occasionally hang the UI for several seconds when opening windows.
  
  
• Allow very long feed URL's.
  
  
• Lots of other smaller tweaks and bug fixes.