Awasu 2.0.1.alpha3

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

If you have not done so already, please read the release notes for alpha2. Some things in this document may not make sense otherwise.

Installation

If you have already installed alpha2, do not install this release on top of it. It won't work. Instead, go back to your saved 2.0 installation (you did save it, right...?) and install on top of that.

If you haven't installed alpha2, save your 2.0 installation (for the same reasons listed in the alpha2 release notes) and unpack the alpha3 zip on top of your existing installation.

Here's the release: Awasu-PersonalEdition-v2.0.1.alpha3.zip

Comments

The biggest problem I had was keeping track of which items are new/unread and how many. In hindsight, this is perhaps not that surprising - Awasu now has so many options to control what exactly gets shown for each channel (e.g. only unread items from the last 10 days or new items only) that figuring these details out (at a reasonable speed) is a very complicated process.

It would be appreciated if you turn on the unread item counts in My Channels (Display tab in the Program Options) and keep an eye on the values to make sure they are correct. Especially if you have a slower machine - I definitely want to see how it performs on older boxen.

It would also be good to set the default length of time to archive content for (Search tab in the Program Options) to something really small, to test the purging of old content. For example, I have this set to 3 days and by default, show content from the last 2 days (Display tab of the Program Options). Awasu is smart enough to recognize that items that were purged should not be flagged as new the next time the channel is updated but there might be a bug in there that I haven't been able to nail down yet so keep an eye out for it.

All components in the release zip should now work properly. Barring any bug fixes, this completes all the archiving-related changes for the next beta. There will be one or two alphas after this one but they will introduce other non-archiving features.

Release notes

• You can now control how long content gets archived for. The settings can be found on the Search page of each channel's Properties dialog. The global defaults can be set on the Search page of the Program Options dialog.
  
  
• Each channel can now specify how much archived content they want to show e.g. the last 50 items or all items from the past 2 weeks. The old "Max Feed Items" setting has been retired since it is no longer necessary. There are also new options in the View|Show feed items menu to temporarily change what gets shown.
  
  
• Awasu now handles the issue of blog posts that have been edited and republished. Each revision is no longer shown as a seperate item although each one is still archived as such. By default, Awasu analyzes each item to see if it looks like one that has been received already and if so, only the most recent one is shown. This feature can be turned off in the Channel Properties ("Disable duplicate item analysis"). There are certain cases where this should be turned on (e.g. for feeds that publish items that share the same URL) and Awasu tries to automatically detect when this needs to be turned on.
  
  
• If duplicate item analysis is enabled for a channel (as it is by default) and modified posts are detected, they will appear as a single entry in the item pane and a special indicator used. Right-click on the item and choose "Show revisions" to see each revision of the item.
  
  
• Sync now works, is much quicker and the sync file considerably smaller.

  There are some new settings on the Save Sync Data dialog. Historical data controls how much historical data to send as part of the sync data. This needs to be at least as big as the number of days you usually have between sync operations. For example, if you sync between home and work, there can be a gap of 3 days between syncs (Friday morning to Monday morning) so this parameter must be greater than 3. It makes the sync data file a bit bigger but not much. Setting it too low will not have any serious consequences other than some items being flagged incorrectly as being new.

  You also have the option of including the last feed for each channel in the sync data file. This produces much bigger sync data files and is slower to process but gives better results (since once you sync the other machine, you will immediately be up-to-date instead of having to wait for all your channels to finish their first update).
  

• Added a feature to optimize the database. This needs to be done on a regular basis and is done automatically every week (by default). The various settings are on the Search page of the Program Options dialog.

  IMPORTANT: Something weird has just started happening and Awasu seems to insist on crashing when it reads or writes to the database after doing an optimize (manual or automatic). If you get this problem, please let me know and turn automatic optimization off :-)
  

• The ChannelMonitorWindow and SendEmail hooks now work. Some of the information sent to hooks via the INI files has changed so if you have written any hooks, they will need to be updated.
  
  
• You might see Awasu get a bit sluggish when opening windows while there are a lot of channels being updated (e.g. after first starting the program). If people are seeing this, I'll add something to try and speed things up a bit.
  
  
• Added an "update all channels" feature (Tools menu) - /taka bows to the cheering users :rolleyes: You can do this once every 3 hours on the Personal Edition and 90 minutes for the AE.
  
  
• Bug fixes :-)