Awasu 2.3.2 (beta)

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.

Installation

First, backup your existing Awasu installation! [?]

Then choose how you want to install this release:

Content filtering

Awasu now lets you adjust feed content before it is shown to you. You simply specify what you're looking for and what you want to replace it with. As usual, these can be configured globally or for individual channels.

The main application of this is to remove advertising from your feeds. The Pro Edition will automatically download rules from our servers to do this while Advanced Edition users can manually add their own.

Integration with Outbrain

Outbrain is a new online service that lets you rate feed items. Their service is particularly interesting since it doesn't take a simple average of all votes but instead personalizes the scores it shows to you by giving more weight to votes coming from people who vote the same way you do.

This feature is off by default but to turn it on, open the Program Options dialog, go to the Advanced tab and click on the new Templates button. After you activate the OUTBRAIN_USERID setting, you will see the Outbrain rating interface at the bottom of each item.

If you want to use this feature, you should also open your defaultItemBody.include file (e.g. in C:\Program Files\Awasu\Resources\Channel Summary Templates\includes) in Notepad, find the line that starts with var OB_testMode = and change the true to be false.

Optimizations galore!

The feed updating engine has been completely rewritten and now updates your channels significantly faster than before. Depending on your PC and which edition of Awasu you are using, you should see a speed-up of 2-5 times!

Tracking revised items is now off by default which significantly reduces the size of the archive database and makes opening channels faster.

The way Awasu tracks which items have been read has been redesigned to allow things to run much more quickly and smoothly.

Finally, Awasu's management of its configuration files has also been redesigned to run much more efficiently, resulting in a more responsive UI.

Minor changes and bug fixes

Channel hooks now get a LastFeed parameter that points to the channel's last feed file.
Fixed an infinite loop when trying to update an improperly configured feed that is using XML redirection.
Downloads happening in the background are suspended if channels are being updated.
The status bar is updated correctly if an error occurs while a feed item is downloaded for offline reading.
Fixed a possible crash during shutdown.
Fixed a problem where feed items were sometimes being downloaded for offline reading even after their parent channel had been deleted.
Fixed a problem that was causing certain keyboard shortcuts to occasionally fire twice.
An icon is now shown in the browser tabs and menu bar for every window.
Fixed a rare problem where a channel would sometimes be flagged as having new content but when you opened it, no items are flagged as new.
Added a button to the About box to show detailed information about the version of Awasu you are running.
The progress bar in the Awasu Administration tool is now completely visible under Vista.
Fixed a crash during startup in the trial versions if the computer is not online.
Fixed a minor problem in the template processor that was causing spurious carriage returns to be inserted.
HTTP 303's are now handled.
Added the ability to set arbitrary template parameters from the UI.
When the Channel Wizard is started with a feed URL preloaded, it now correctly distinguishes between the different types of feed (Internet-based, file-based or plugin).
Worked around a problem in the third-party GUI toolkit Awasu uses that stopped the Window menu from tracking open browser tabs
Worked around a problem introduced by a third-party tool that stopped Awasu from running under a Windows account that has non-English characters in its name.
Reduced a lot of the flickering.
Tweaked the way email addresses in RSS feeds are parsed.
Worked around a problem in a Microsoft component that sometimes caused Awasu to silently crash and disappear when downloading feed items for offline reading.
Changed the way channel windows load their content.
Stopped the Channel Wizard from issuing a spurious "Can't open the XML file" error if the feed for the new channel couldn't be downloaded.
Enabled auto-complete when browsing for files, directories or URL's.
Tweaked the regular expression engine to better handle searching multi-line content.
Certain safe HTML attributes are now always allowed through when processing templates.
Fixed a problem that was causing strange things to happen in the UI when trying to invoke a channel hook command.
Messages are tidied up before being showing in notification balloons.
Channel packs are downloaded and checks for new versions of Awasu are now done more efficiently and frequently.
Fixed a problem that was stopping admin.exe from running if certain special accounts are present on your system.

Known issues

Awasu downloads the latest ad-blockers every 24 hours but if this fails (e.g. because of a flaky connection) then even previously-downloaded ad-blockers will not be activated.
If you find ads suddenly starting to appear, try restarting Awasu and watch the Activity Log to check that the latest ad-blockers are downloaded successfully.

Language Packs

This version of Awasu can be run in languages other than English. Simply download one of the ZIP files below and unpack it to the specified directory.

Then restart Awasu and change the language from the Tools|Language menu.

Language	Unpack to
German	`C:\Program Files\Awasu\LanguagePacks\deu\`

If you'd like to provide a translation in your favorite language, please let us know and we'll get you set up.


Copyright © Awasu Pty. Ltd. 2002-23 All rights reserved. Graphic design by c-squared Awasu and the stylized Japanese character in the orange box are trademarks of Awasu Pty. Ltd. Other brands and product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Awasu Pty. Ltd. believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. Such information is subject to change without notice. Awasu Pty. Ltd. is not responsible for inadvertent errors.