Omea is the new FeedDemon
I seem to be doing software service announcements lately, but I’m just levelling out my 3rd party tools and whatnot on my laptop as I spend a Sunday afternoon catching up on podcasts and coding stuff in the background (I’m just too A.D.D. to be doing one thing at a time).
Recently I’ve been struggling with my RSS feeds, newsgroups, and email. Basically I’ve been trying to find a good set of tools/add-ins to manage email, RSS feeds, newsgroup postings, and (to a lesser extent) bookmarks). I mean here we are in the information age, but there’s so much information out there. So many inputs coming in, and trying to sort it all out with tools. I’ve installed and tried out various tools and tool combos which went through a folly of tools:
- RSS Bandit for RSS feeds
- RSS Bandit for newsgroup posts
- Outlook 2003 + Newshound for newsgroup posts
- Outlook 2003 + IntraVnews for RSS feeds
- FeedDemon for RSS feeds
- Outlook 2007 for RSS feeds
- Outlook 2007 + Newshound for newsgroup posts
I think I’ve finally found the sweet spot. Thanks to Andrew Connell who uses Omea reader, I decided to give it a try. It’s by the guys from JetBrains who make ReSharper, IntelliJ, and a whole bunch of cool tools. AC uses the notify feature of it to read newsgroups, and be notified when someone replies to a thread (usually one he replies to). This is a great feature of the tool because in this day, we’re trying to sift through hundreds of posts a day in a half dozen SharePoint newsgroups. No easy feat even for a super-human MVP like myself.
I downloaded the tool, imported my OPML and found it to be slick. It lets me categorize the content as there are many blog entries I keep as a knowledge base. It’s fast and downloads/updates in the background and doesn’t require a gob of memory (one of the problems with RSS Bandit). And the notify feature just rocks.
So I’m now hooked on JetBrains Omea Reader for RSS feeds and newsgroups and Outlook will just be fine for email. Omea can handle your mail as well, but I think I’ll stick with Outlook for now.
Anyways, enough with the tools. Time to get back to writing tests. Red. Green. Refactor. It’s a great Sunday!