Earlier this month Christopher Steen gave a CMAP presentation on ReSharper by JetBrains. Chris had a lot of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ going. I was prepared to steal Chris’s laptop and lock myself in a room- just to spend a few minutes alone with the tool before surrendering to police, but I exercised patience instead.
While checking out the JetBrains site I noticed Omea Reader (currently free) and Omea Pro. I’ve been looking for a better newsgroup reader. For the last 10 years I’ve used Agent, but it still doesn’t support multiple newsgroup servers in a single instance.
Omea Reader currently supports multiple newsgroup servers, has a sharp interface and RSS feeds. The app offers various ways to categorize, annotate, and flag posts. The major downside to me is the need to use the Ctrl key for short cut operations, like to mark a post as read, or move to the next unread post. There also doesn’t appear to be a kill file, or a way to mark a thread to ignore. Without these features, the app feels too cumbersome for high volume groups (300+ posts a day). Agent has these features, and the commands need only a single finger.
Omea Reader isn’t quite out of the running yet though, because there is a plug-in architecture….
Comments
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<br>I'm hooked on RSS Bandit so I won't be changing but for someone that hasn't really found their news aggregator shopping around for one that includes many different "news sources" is almost a must now. Having one client for every little thing starts to be a bit much. That's probably why Newsgator, etc are so popular.
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<br>For news it was not useful IMHO. I use thunderbird 1.0 for news, and it's very easy to use and reliable. I used to use XNews for a long time before that. RSS in thunderbird is a joke, so don't throw rss bandit (which I use too) out the door yet ;).
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<br>(now, if they only could fix the hanging thread problem with rssbandit it would be great (i.e. rss bandit reads the feed but apparently hangs as the server isnt responding or something, and there is apparently no timeout).