Ktn

I’ve been using Omea Reader for quite some time now, I even mentioned an update some months ago.

I disabled a few plug-ins such as Contacts, Favorites, and News to improve the startup time of Omea Reader. I’m not sure if I can disable also the Notes and Pictures plug-ins, I haven’t done so in case the feed functionality needs them. One thing that I definitely don’t recommend is the use of the Favorites plug-in, it retrieves your Firefox bookmarks (and IE also I think) and stores them in an awkward way, not intuitive at all, it’s almost the opposite type of organization than in Firefox, and I have to say that when I installed Omea Reader the first time I had almost 5,000 bookmarks in Firefox, and really having them in Omea Reader didn’t make any sense; less because of the difficulty to find something there.

From here onwards I’ll talk about the details related to the feed reader support only.

To start I have to say that the functionality to parse (the RSS and Atom XML files) and show the entries or items is really good. I mean, Thunderbird still suffers from the Duplicate entries bug but I have never seen that behavior in Omea Reader. I like the way it shows the number of unread items to the right of the feed name, the same as in Thunderbird; the better part is that Omea Reader shows the unread number of items per folder, day, week, month or total. Right now it tells me that I have 243,198 unread items (of 251,128 total, this value is not easy to find out).

Another thing I like is that it gets and shows the favicons for each feed and on each entry (this is configurable), in both cases to the left. This is useful when you click on a feed folder because it shows all of the entries for each of the feeds under that folder. We can name it as categories, groups of feeds or whatever we want.

The default search is good, it searches in all of the feeds in any folder, so usually you get a lot of items in the result list, or at least that happens to me because of the bunch of feeds (172 at the moment) I have and I don’t specify to auto-delete aged entries, I keep everything. The Advanced Search functionality offers several good options, but I don’t use it, it’s a bit complex when the interface and options could be easier I think. That part needs to be more intuitive.

One of its weaknesses, and I think the same applies for most aggregators, is that with the number of entries it holds, the memory usage is 117,160 KB, and consuming a Virtual Memory of 120,408 KB in Windows XP.

Another big problem is the ‘Database’ size. That directory’s size, without including subdirectories, is 591 MB. The db subdirectory is 611 MB, and the backup subdirectory contains a zip file of 123 MB in size. I can disable this database backup directory but I’m thinking this may help to store all of the entries for the future. Although I’m just realizing that the Help doesn’t mentions it, the screenshot in there doesn’t even have that option! Maybe the files in that zip aren’t useful at all.

Guess what? I shouldn’t have tried to search in the Help for “backup”, now Omea Reader is not responding! Looks to me like certain threads are stuck but others are working, I just saw an alert that it updated a feed with a new item. Curious! I had to end it. Nothing strange about this appears in the logs.

Without counting the logs and the binaries and dlls for it to run it takes 1,325 MB of hard disk space. Including everything it takes 1.41 GB.

What I would like to see in the Properties for each feed is a checkbox to index the contents, selected by default but at least providing a way to avoid specific feeds to be indexed and thus also avoid the “Database” directory to be so big.

Another thing is that RSS feeds seem to contain a tag for comments to entries, and so Omea Reader shows a ‘+’ symbol to the left of each entry allowing you to click on it to “expand” the entry and see its comments. Obviously Omea Reader does not download them by default, it does so in the moment you click on the plus sign. I would like to see the same for Atom feeds, not sure if this is something yet to be implemented in the Atom specification or in Omea Reader.

The last thing that I’ll mention is that there’s an icon in the top right corner of the preview pane that is a double arrow pointing to the bottom that you click and it shows more information about the entry, but in fact it just shows the same information that is at the top of the preview pane, the “From” and “Weblog” fields, and that’s all. It needs to really show every bit of additional info for that particular entry, not just what is shown in the list of entries pane. The columns for the list of entries pane can be configured and is the one that shows more information, but looks like it still needs to support more than one category (this is the “Pub. Category” column), because we in IBM are using it as the tags, so usually an entry has more than one tag and so it represents more than one category for an individual entry from a feed reader point of view.

That’s it. It certainly has several things to configure and filter stuff, but I don’t use them. You’ll have to try it out to provide your own opinion. You’ll find it here.

Now that I had the time to review it, and create this blog post, I’ll consider the move to Omea Pro since it’s now free since December 4, 2006. There were plans to make it open source but I haven’t heard anything yet about that.