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Awasu Personal Edition - RSS News Feed Reader
Awasu Personal Edition - RSS News Feed Reader
Heinz Tschabitscher
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Awasu Personal Edition 2.0.5 - RSS News Feed Reader

From Heinz Tschabitscher,
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The Bottom Line

Awasu Personal Edition is an extremely feature-rich RSS feed reader. The option to enhance it with plugins and hooks in particular makes Awasu a powerful aggregator, in spite of some limitations.
Pros
  • Awasu has great news notifications and flexible display options
  • Plugins and hooks allow you to enhance and customize Awasu
  • Lets you organize feeds in categories
Cons
  • Awasu lack saved searches and virtual folders
  • Doesn't thread items or put news in context
  • Awasu Personal Edition limits the number of feeds, plugins, etc.

Description

  • Awasu Personal Edition is an RSS feed aggregator and news reader.
  • Feeds can be assigned to any number of categories, which can be displayed flexibly in Awasu.
  • Awasu can announce news via sound, tray icon and notification balloon, each set per channel.
  • Additionally, you can add channels to the Awasu system tray icon menu for fast access to headlines.
  • You can search your news feeds, Feedster, Technorati, Google and others inside Awasu.
  • Plugins can broaden the scope of Awasu by allowing it to treat any source as an RSS news channel.
  • Channel hooks let Awasu analyze and use news (by emailing or databasing them, for example).
  • Awasu can import from OPML files and makes it easy to put two Awasu installations in sync.
  • Support for feed enclosures enables automatic downloads and podcasting in Awasu.
  • Awasu Personal Edition supports Windows 98/ME/2000/3/XP.

Guide Review - Awasu Personal Edition 2.0.5 - RSS News Feed Reader

"Awasu" is Japanese and means "to unite". That's what the About window of Awasu Personal Edition says. Awasu's expandability is the strongest materialization of this manifesto.

It's great how plugins allow Awasu to read all kinds of news sources in addition to RSS feeds, but the channel hooks are even better. They move Awasu beyond displaying news. Using these hooks, you can make it analyze, extract and work with news items. Awasu comes with a pre-built hook to email news, for example, or you could make it write selected news to a database.

Awasu itself is also a great place to read news and lets you search your channels flexibly. Regrettably, Awasu doesn't allow you to save these searches in the form of virtual folders. Awasu also lacks integration with news search engines that would allow it to contextualize news with related items automatically.

Support for feed enclosures lets you use Awasu for podcasting and other automatic downloads, though. If you use Awasu on more than one computer, it has another seriously cool feature, though: it's easy to synchronize not only your subscriptions but also news item status.
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