Awasu Personal Edition v1.1.1 (beta)

UPDATE: This beta has expired. Please check the releases page for information about the latest releases.

IMPORTANT: This is a beta release. Some features may not be complete and the software may be unstable. Install at your own risk! You may need to do some basic computer maintenance tasks to get this release to run.

Please read the installation instructions (given below) carefully. It's not going to work properly if you don't!

I say this every release but this time I mean it!!! :-)

IMPORTANT: This software requires Windows NT, 2000 or XP. If you are using Windows 98 or ME, please contact us (a version for you guys will be coming soon).

 

New features

  • Converted Awasu to use Unicode. This allows it to read feeds in languages other than English.

  • Added support for SOAP and XSLT. This allows Awasu to retrieve information from web services (or any other source that returns XML) and convert it to an RSS feed. Sample SOAP requests and XSLT stylesheets are provided to monitor the Code Project forums and Google searches. Please read the sample files for instructions. You must have MSXML 4.0 installed to use the XSLT feature.

  • Added support for windows-NNNN encodings (in particular, windows-1252).

  • Added an option to override the encoding used when parsing RSS feeds.

    For existing channels, stop Awasu and open the channel's config file in your user's Channels directory. Find the entry that says EncodingOverride= and set it to the encoding you want to use (which must be one of utf-8, utf-16, iso-8859-1, us-ascii or windows-NNNN).

    If you are unable to create a new channel because of encoding problems, create a file your user's Channels directory (the name doesn't matter as long as it has a .rss extension) that looks like below and restart Awasu. 

    
    [Config]
    RssChannelUrl=put the URL of the feed here (including the http://)
    EncodingOverride=put the required encoding here

Bug fixes and minor changes

  • Fixed problems with the way licence keys and passwords were being saved.

  • Removed HTML tags from notification balloons and channel titles.

  • Fixed duplicate shortcuts in the Edit menu.

  • Fixed an incorrect URL for the Technorati user tool.

Installation

Make sure Awasu is not running. Rename the installation directory to something different e.g. C:\Program Files\Awasu.bak. This will serve as your backup. It is recommended that you keep this directory for a while since once you have upgraded to this version, you cannot go back to a previous version.

Create a new installation directory e.g. C:\Program Files\Awasu.

Copy your old Users directory (and everything under it) to the new installation directory
    e.g. C:\Program Files\Awasu.bak\Users => C:\Program Files\Awasu\Users

Unpack the following zips to the new installation directory:

IMPORTANT: The above download is the Personal Edition. If you have purchased the Advanced Edition and would like to use the new features, please contact us for details on where to download the Advanced Edition beta.

Run upgrade.exe, which you will find in the installation directory. You must do this even if you are installing for the first time. Depending on how many channels you have and the speed of your machine, this may take several minutes to run (you will be be told when it has finished). Apologies for the crummy UI - I originally had something really nice but MFC (Microsoft's GUI toolkit) insisted on crashing afterwards :-(

Copy all of the .template files from the Resources directory to your user's home directory:
    e.g. C:\Program Files\Awasu\Resources\*.template => C:\Program Files\Awasu\Users\YOUR-NAME

You can now run Awasu. Try subscribing to the following channel and you should see a feed in Greek:
    

 

Installation notes

  • You may see some odd characters in channels until they are next updated.

  • Licence keys and passwords must be re-entered.

  • Both Google and Feedster can handle searches for non-English text. If you have not changed the URL's in the config file, they will be automatically upgraded for you. Otherwise, you will have to change them yourself. The new URL's are:
        http://www.google.com/search?q={%SELTEXT%}&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8     http://www.feedster.com/search.php?q={%SELTEXT%}&ie=UTF-8

  • The Code Project plugin is no more. Please delete your feeds and recreate them using the new XSLT feature. Check the files in the XSLT sub-directory for instructions.

  • INI files are now stored as UTF-8.

  • Log files are now written out as Unicode. You must use a Unicode-aware text editor to read them e.g. Notepad or Wordpad.

  • Third-party plugins or channel hooks should still work. If you want to upgrade them to handle non-English text, all communications between Awasu and external modules is now done using UTF-8.

  • Channel filters that specify text to search for in channel URL's, titles or descriptions can only search for English text.

  • Emails sent out by the SendEmail channel hook are in English only (this will be fixed soon).

  • If you have downloaded any of the new channel summary page templates, get them again or add the following <META> tag to the head section of your existing files: 
    
    <HEAD>
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    </HEAD>
    You should do a similar thing for any custom report templates you have written. If you have written report templates that output XML, you should ensure that they specify a UTF-8 encoding by having the following line at the start of the file: 
    
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>