Wot's It! 0.1 (19 October 2002)

This was the very first release of Awasu, or Wot's It! as it was known then (!) I had dreamed the whole thing up after one drunken night at the pub a deep and intense meeting with a friend of mine who is also really into knowledge management. Unfortunately, I had misheard the name he suggested (What's On) and so it ended up being called Wot's It! instead :-)

This was a friends-and-family release and was very much a proof-of-concept thing. Most of the work had been done in the RSS engine with the bare minimum of UI, just enough for the thing to be used. It only ran from the system tray and all the feed content had to be accessed via the system tray menu since there was no integrated browser. There was no Channel Wizard either and channel config files had to be set up manually and the program restarted!

But even with this release, some of the core principles behind Awasu could be seen with plugin channels that retrieved information from non-RSS sources.

There weren't many options for configuring channels back then.

And even fewer program options!

Even in the early days, the dangers of RSS addiction were apparent. The system tray icon said Ay caramba! when new content arrived and Doh! if an error occurred so whenever The Simpsons happened to be on the TV while I was working, my eyes kept going to the bottom-right of my computer's monitor looking for a balloon whenever I heard the magic words. Sigh...