My Channels folders

In its simplest form, My Channels folders work the same way as with any other program that uses trees: you can create folders (right-click in My Channels and choose Folders|New folder), delete them (File|Delete) and drag stuff around.

However, Awasu's My Channels window is much more sophisticated than a simple tree hierarchy and builds upon the power of Awasu's channel categories and filters. The key difference is that channels can appear in more than folder at the same time. If you look at the screenshot, you can see that the Awasu News channel appears in the My Favorites, Technology and News folders (since it actually does belong in each of these folders).

This can be achieved by holding down the Control key when dragging channels around. You can also put a channel into folders from the channel's Properties dialog (Search tab).

NOTE: Channels that have not been put into any folders will appear in the top-level of My Channels.

Folders and channel filters

The power that folders offer comes through the use of channel filters. For example, you might have a channel filter that has been configured to show only channels in the News folder and another one to show only channels in Technology. However, if you apply either filter to My Channels, Awasu News will appear in both cases. Filters can also specify multiple criteria e.g. show only channels that have new content and live in either the Technology or News folders (screenshot).

Awasu is smart about how channel filters handle folders and sub-folders. For example, if you have folders set up as in the screenshot above, a channel filter that looks for channels in the News folder will also pick up anything in any sub-folder. If you don't want this behaviour, it can be turned off in the channel filter's dialog by checking Match folders exactly. For the filter in the screenshot, turning this option on would mean that a channel must be in the News folder itself and channels in any sub-folder will be rejected.

If you are familiar with how the old channel categories worked, it might be useful to think of things like this: categories correspond to top-level folders in the tree (in fact, this is exactly how Awasu looks at things when it upgrades your existing categories to folders). But now, you can create categories in a hierarchy e.g. News/International/Europe is a single category but is also a sub-category of the News/International category. Tagging is an increasingly popular way of managing meta-data and in knowledge management parlance, the hierarchy of categories that you create via the folder tree is a taxonomy of tags that Awasu can use when filtering channels. We will also be adding features to soon to use this taxonomy in the search engine as well.

 

Other stuff

  • A toolbar has also been added to the top of My Channels so that you can easily manage your channel filters. Right-click on it to get a menu of folder operations.

  • The order that folders appear in can be controlled by how they are dragged around. A folder is divided into three zones and where a folder ends up depends on where exactly you drag it to within the target folder (see below). The cursor will change if you are dragging a folder before or after another folder.

  • Folders can be configured to show how many channels they contain. This can be turned on in the Display tab of the Program Options dialog: Show how many channels are in each My Channels folder.

  • Press F2 to change the name of a channel or folder directly within My Channels.

  • Dragging a channel out of the My Channels window will simply remove it from its folder.