There's a reason why I'm cautious towards Outlook add-ons like Newsgator and Attensa, it seems that whenever I wade into these waters I come out cold, wet, and tired. I gave Attensa a good review when I initially installed it, primarily because it was really fast and unobtrusive, however after using it for a couple of weeks I uninstalled it today. I was experinecing a frustrating slowdown in Outlook where the app wouldn't respond for up to 2 minutes, and in addition to that problem I was getting a userinit.exe memory problem. I don't think that Attensa is a poorly written app, but I have come to the conclusion that Outlook is a poor application for layering on 3rd party extensions. Never again.
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Sep 12, 2005
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So I'm not alone ... I actually installed Attensa after inspired by your post, and loved it.. until it stopped doing any updates today. Now that I look back, it's been skipping posts for days.
I can't report on the slowdown, I've been experiencing that on Outlook even without Attensa.
No patience left for bug-tracking, testing .. uninstall, back to Bloglines :-(
Posted by: Zoli Erdos | Sep 15, 2005 at 05:42 PM
You imply that newsgator gives (or gave) the same problems. I have been using newsgator for many months now and have had no problems at all.
Posted by: Andrew | Sep 25, 2005 at 03:35 PM
Andrew,
This is the difficult part of software development, ensuring that the broad spectrum of users has the kind of experience that you have been seeing.
On a related note, Attensa did reach out to me to find out what issues I was having, and in the course of the conversation they said that they had in fact added a throttle to the control that interacts with Outlook. The goal was to improve responsiveness and stability in Outlook.
Posted by: jeff | Sep 25, 2005 at 07:14 PM
The throttle control is a good idea - or so I thought. Tried their new version for a while, minimizing the resources devoted to Attensa. Today I just rebooted for the third time: 100% CPU use, 98% of that by the Attensa Engine.
I guess I can't really complain, it is BETA, after all... but I don't have the time for this.
Game over.
Posted by: Zoli Erdos | Sep 26, 2005 at 03:28 PM