Awasu 2.2.3.alpha1

IMPORTANT: This is an alpha release (what's this?). Some features are not complete and you will find bugs!

You must be already running 2.2.1 or 2.2.2

To install:

Read the release notes below first!

Backup your Awasu installation directory and keep it, even if the alpha appears to work correctly.

Unpack one (!) of the following zips on top of your existing installation:

Personal Edition	NT/2K/XP	98/Me
Advanced Edition	NT/2K/XP
Professional Edition	NT/2K/XP

Run ArchiveMaintenance.exe (in the Awasu installation directory) to upgrade your databases.
NOTE: This upgrade will take some time to run. As a guide, a 230Mb ARCHIVE.DB file with 91,000 items across 311 channels took around 25 minutes to upgrade on a 1.6 P4M with 2Gb of RAM and a 7200rpm disk. An optimization took an additional 8 minutes.

IMPORTANT: If you are currently using the experimental build, you must revert back to your previously-saved 2.2.1 installation. Trying to install this release on top of the experimental build will not work! Given that this is an alpha release, it would be prudent to retain the backup copy of your 2.2.1 installation.

Optimizations

Optimized the way feed content is stored in the database. This makes both saving new content and retrieving old content much faster.

Optimized the analysis of a feed Awasu does when updating channels. In particular, it is now much quicker when nothing new has been received.

Awasu now waits until the first pass of channel updates has finished before doing house-keeping maintenance on channels. This used to contribute significantly to the problem of Awasu making a PC difficult to use after it had been started because it was hitting the disk too hard.

Channels now load much faster at startup.

Minimized the impact background database activity has on the UI.

Deleting channels, updating workpads and marking items as read/unread are now done in the background, making the UI much more responsive when performing these operations.

Minor changes and bug fixes

Show the watermark in the channel summary pages in the background (instead of in front of the channel content).

Fixed a problem in Awasu's xml:base processing (i.e. how it converts relative URL's to absolute).

Added an option to disable error dialog boxes (especially for script errors) issued by the embedded IE browser.

This switch can be found in the top-right corner of the Display tab of the Program Options dialog.

Show information about channels being updated and offline content being downloaded in the status bar.

Renamed Disable item revisions to Show revised items separately in the Channel Properties dialog.

Folders in the My Channels window no longer automatically open up when a channel is dragged in.

The old behaviour can be restored by creating a DEBUG.INI file that looks like this:

    [Debug]
    AutoSelectChannelAfterDrag=1

Changed the name of the default channel filter sort order from Default to Channel name.

Reduced occasional flickering in the channel summary pages.

Fixed the problem of channels sometimes re-appearing after having been deleted.

Fixed a rare problem where a channel could still sometimes appear in the My Channels window even after it had been deleted.

The special dialog that was shown if you tried to delete a channel that lives in at least one folder can now be turned off.

Open your user's CONFIG.INI in Notepad, find the line that says DeleteChannelDlgSafeMode=1 and change the 1 to a 0.

Ensure that an item remains selected after deleting items from a workpad.