Awasu 2.0.1.alpha2

IMPORTANT: This is an alpha release. Some features are not complete and you will find bugs!

Installation is straight-forward:

• Read the release notes below first!
• Backup your Awasu installation directory. This is critical - there may not necessarily be an upgrade path from this alpha to subsequent ones. It is recommended that you start from a 2.0 installation and upgrade that to each alpha each time they are released.
• Unpack this zip on top of your existing installation.

Release notes

• There will be a brief delay the first time you run this version (before the main window appears) as Awasu upgrades all your channels and creates the archive database.
  
  
• As promised, startup is now significantly faster but even I was impressed at how much faster. You'll all be very pleased :-) Memory usage is also a lot better.
  
  
• Channels will be empty until their first update. If you open a channel and find it has no content, do a manual update.
  
  
• Awasu currently archives and shows everything - see below for what's coming in the next alpha. The best way to control how much stuff gets shown in the channel summary pages is to set the default Show Feed Items mode to "unread" and then make sure you mark items as read if you don't want to see them again. You can also set the max # feed items to show for each channel.
  
  
• Awasu treats every item it sees as a unique entity, even those posts that are the same but have been edited slightly. Something will be added for the next alpha to be more user-friendly about this i.e. only show the most recent version of any given post.
  
  
• Parsing of xhtml:body now works properly.
  
  
• Until the proper search engine is implemented, search is going to be really slow. Therefore, search only checks the most recent feed for each channel.
  
  
• My Channels can no longer be sorted by the # of new items in each channel.
  
  
• You can no longer mark a channel as having new content.
  
  
• You can no longer mark all items as unread.
  
  
• The GUI will sometimes hang if there are a lot of updates are going on at the same time. However, this has only happened during stress-testing which puts far more load on Awasu than it will ever see in normal use. If you are seeing the GUI hang, please let me know and I'll send you something to try.
  
  
• You may get the occasional "database is locked" error. Again, this only happens under extreme load - please let me know if you see it.
  
  
• Sync has not been properly tested but should still work. However, the read/unread status of each item will not be transferred across between machines. Also, if you have 2.0.1.alpha1, don't try sync'ing with 2.0.1.alpha2! Odd things may happen :-)
  
  
• Feed content is no longer stored in the .CHANNEL files. This will obviously have an impact on anything looking for it there (e.g. channel hooks).
  
  
• Only the main app has been tested - app plugins (e.g. Syndic8 and Yahoo! Groups) may or may not work. Channel hooks definitely won't work.
  
  
• There is no longer an ExpiredFeedItem event.
  
  
• The MarkFeedItemAsViewed event no longer has an isEndMarkAll parameter. There is a new MarkAllFeedItemsAsViewed event that is raised when the user marks all feed items as viewed. Hooks that are interested in detecting when a feed item becomes flagged as read or unread must register for both of these events.
  
  
• Feed item ID's are now numeric, not strings.
  
  
• The ability to import URL's into Awasu to mark them as read has been removed.
  
  
• The system tray menu only shows items from the last feed and therefore may not correspond to what you see in a channel's window.

What's coming next

• The ability to specify how long to archive content for (if at all).
  
  
• The ability to restrict what feed items get shown in each channel's summary page e.g. unread items from the past 2 weeks.
  
  
• The ability to identify feed items that are the same but are slightly different i.e. posts that have been edited.
  
  
• Optimizations.
  
  
• Hooks will work.
  
  
• Sync will be upgraded to transfer the read/unread status of feed items.