Omea Reader

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….