Review: Omea Pro 2.0

Omea Pro 2.0, $49
JetBrains
Prague, Czech Republic
+420 2 4172 2501
(609) 714 7883
http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/index.html

There are not a whole lot of applications that come along and change the way that I work. Based on the last couple of days, it looks like Omea Pro 2.0 is going to be one of those. I took a look at the first release of Omea Pro when it came out, thought it was mildly interesting, and moved on. With 2.0, though, JetBrains has hit a very sweet spot in information management, pulling together a lot of tools in one nice interface that I find both powerful and easy to use. There are still some rough edges, and room for improvement, but I've already started depending on it to manage my e-mail, RSS feeds, and newsgroups - and I suspect that I'll be using it even more heavily in the future. While not a tool for the casual user, I think this one has a real future with those who spend their days shuffling too much information around from one bin to another.

What Omea Pro tries to do is pull together as many disparate information sources as possible into one interface. It offers tabs for Mail (synchronized to Outlook), IM (synchronized to your Miranda or ICQ history), News (its own NNTP reader), Web, Feeds (a good RSS reader), Files (which can index any disks you like, and reads Word, Excel, Acrobat, and text files), Contacts, and Tasks. On installation it finds and indexes your existing information, and then it adds its own management on top. You can, for example, create as many "Workspaces" as you like, each with a subset of the resources managed by Omea Pro. So if you've got a set of e-mail folders, newsgroups, and RSS feeds that are applicable to a particular task, you can pull those together into one place and concentrate on them to the exclusion of all else. You can add annotations to anything. You can link things together. You can use toolbars integrated into IE or Firefox to subscribe to feeds or to send annotated Web clippings to Omea Pro for storage and later retrieval. Of course there are searching and indexing facilities built in as well.

You can also create categories to organize your resources, and set up views using a very detailed list of conditions to pull out just the resources you want. And, I suspect, there are capabilities that I haven't even discovered yet; this is a big application with lots of flexibility, and an almost bewildering variety of tabs and shortcuts. If you prefer simplicity, Omea Pro probably isn't for you; it's for those of us whose information needs have gone well beyond the point of simiplicity. And just in case there's not enough in the box already, there's a published API with downloadable documentation and sample code that lets you extend the product yourself.

As I said, there's still some room for improvement. I find myself switching back to Outlook to use SpamBayes, because there's no effective spam filtering here. I also miss some of the other user interface shortcuts from Outlook such as the Move To Folder toolbar button. But those are minor quibbles, and they're not nearly enough to get me to move back from this application to the three or four that it's replacing for me. Given how quickly I've taken to it, how many new uses I'm finding for its capabilities, and how responsive the support people have been on the Omea Pro newsgroup, I expect to be a happy customer for a long time to come.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Published September 8, 2005