Omea: Day One

So I’ve spent more time playing with Omea. I love some of the details, like the setting to mark an item read once it’s been displayed for 2 seconds. I don’t know how many times I’ll errantly click something, or scroll through, and not having things marked as “read” is nice. The use of favicon.ico is nice, too — it helps me visually sort the blogs. Plus the app looks nice. Vyacheslav Lukianov from JetBrains posted a comment here yesterday, which I think is really cool. It’s now obvious to me that they’re watching to see what people think of Omea, so I thought it fair to follow up with my impressions after the first 24 hours.

I was going to write about Omea not wanting to update anything, but then I noticed that it had a red exclamation point in the bottom status bar, which seemed to indicate things weren’t all good. A simple restart took care of that. I didn’t look carefully at the errors. I’ll worry about it if it gets weird again later. I’m always willing to give an app the benefit of the doubt, especially when it just got done indexing stuff that was imported from another app. I hadn’t restarted the application at all at the point where this happened, and it’s been flawless since. I didn’t notice if there were any other indications that there was something wrong. A change in the system tray icon might be a good way to indicate that something is wrong.

I did find a bug, which I reported via their web site. Cancelling out of the “Select Category” dialog causes the application to hang (Edit View->Add a category exception->”New” in the Select Category dialog->Cancel->dead…). Undoubtably just an oversight, as users probably define a category if they go in there. 🙂

I absolutely love the custom feed views. I sort my feeds into two categories, which I’ve made into “feed folders” in Omea. The categories for me are: “I will read your blog every day” and “Your blog is annoying in some way that makes me not want to deal with it except when I have time.” Blogs in the second category usually have so much content per day that it’s a full time job to read them, or sometimes it’s a blog that doesn’t post the full content of their articles in the feed. If you write a blog that makes people go to your website, um, stop it. Or figure out a way to put your ads in the feed.

I really like that I can make a custom feed view that lets me exclude the feeds I don’t want to track on a daily basis. I just wish I could select a feed folder, rather than having to specifically exclude every feed I don’t want. Now, when I add another feed to the “annoying” list I’ll have to update all my views. Not the worst thing in the world, but if the user is grouping stuff let them filter on the groups. 🙂 Vyacheslav, if you’re reading this, that’s a feature request. 🙂

One of the first things I did was unload all the plugins except the RSS feed one. I also customized it so that it would open all URLs in my OS default web browser (Firefox set to open new windows as tabs). And I set the default update interval for everything to be 1 hour.

So, after 24 hours of using it, I’ve concluded that this isn’t a feed reader my mother will like. However, it is a feed reader that lets me organize all the information I get, and despite my mother I love it. Besides, my mother isn’t into blogs. Yet. 🙂 (Actually, I bet she would be if I found a quilting blog for her). Good job, JetBrains!