Awasu Personal Edition

With so much information on the Internet, it gets harder to keep track of it or to filter what you need. When searching for news from different sources, you have to access more than one web site, navigate through articles that may not interest you, try to avoid all sorts of advertisement pop ups and then you will finally get where you want to. The concept behind Awasu Personal Edition is not new, but it is an efficient feed reader, full of features which allow for smooth information management.

Although it's a complex program, its installation kit is just 8.33 Mb large. While installing, you won't need to make any Internet related configurations or install additional tools. All you have to do is set a destination path and shortcuts.

Seeing Awasu's interface for the first time may scare you a bit. That's what programs with lots of buttons and hyperlinks usually do. But in one or two minutes you can figure out its core functions and use them with no problems. The central part of the window works like a web browser where you can read your news articles, blogs and other channels. When accessing a feed, this area will be divided into two areas. The lower part is the actual browser and above it, you can find a list with headlines from a selected channel. Clicking on one of them will display its content in the browser. Each channel you access will be displayed on a new tab, placed on the lower edge of the browser. This way you can switch between them without too much navigation.

To add a new channel you need to click a hyperlink from a tasks list, located on the right side of the window. A wizard will guide you through a number of steps, during which you can make some basic configurations, like typing the channel's name and description or advanced ones, such as setting an update schedule, setting for how long the content should be held and more. Most of these are not mandatory. You can just copy and paste a feed's URL and click the Create now button, during the first step of the wizard, thus skipping everything else.

You can also find a channel pack feature that allows you to quickly add one or more feeds. Just click the Channel packs hyperlink from the tasks list and a window will show up where you can choose a category, like business, technology and more. Once you've selected one, another window appears with a long list of feeds from known websites like Reuters, BBC and others you may not even heard about. To add them, simply click on their check boxes and then on the import button.

All feeds can be neatly organized in a folder structure which you will find on the left side of the main window. In this area, the actual feeds will appear as hyperlinks and you can move them to a specific folder by simply clicking and dragging them. By default, you will already find folders for news, business, entertainment, sports, blogs and others, but you can, of course, create your own by right clicking in the folder area and navigating through the menu that will pop up.

The number of features you can find gives Awasu great flexibility. If you keep exploring the interface you will always find something useful. Each channel can be configured separately. You can find quite a number of options in their properties panels, like setting an expiring date, adding certain HTML tags and attributes, setting automatic updates and many more.