Attensa released a new version of its rss reader for outlook/attention management software. Those who saw my presentation on attention data at barcamp london will have heard me talk about Attensa. It prioritises your feeds in a “river of news” view so that in theory at least you see the posts you want to first whilst still retaining the ability to jump easily to feeds you want to check less often.

The new version improved 2 key things for me – one was an error on startup of outlook (which when I ignored seemed not to interfere with the running of the software) and the other was the inability to use the scroll mouse with any accuracy. Both these have been fixed so I am now a very happy user of the Attensa reader 🙂

A desktop alert system was introduced in this release which I am hoping that it is just the first step along the way as all it does right now is tell you that a post has arrived from feed X. I’d much prefer it to tell me what the post is so that I can decide then and there whether I want to read it.

There are a few other major improvements i would like to see:

• The first is to the river of news view – it still prioritises by feed rather than post – so even if some of the posts do not interest me at all they are prioritised along with the rest of them 🙁
• The second is similar to the search boxes found all over Vista – the ability to type in a tag/keyword and immediately see the posts referring to it. I wonder if I would actually use this often but it certainly makes finding those posts easier and quicker 🙂

Overall though it is a very good RSS reader in itself (having the flexibility of both the river of news view, folders and integrated into the outlook application). It will be interesting to see how the attention management side of the application progresses over time as there is still plenty of room for improvement – not least by adding support for email.