New in Omea Pro 2.2

Email and Tasks

Universal shortcut Ctrl-Shift-M starts new mail in any Tab.
Pressing Ins key in the Todo pane creates a new task.
Shift+Ins key in the Todo pane creates a new subtask and places it under the currently selected task.
Action Clone Task in the context menu allows to create a copy of the task with all categories and attachments duplicated.

NNTP Plugin

New action in the Action Pane: show article headers.
Shortcut Ctrl-Alt-R: Reply to the newsgroup without original quotation.
Ability to reply to the newsgroup with the text currently selected in the source news article.

RSS Plugin

Context menu item Copy post URL copies feed post's source URL into the clipboard.
Option Show detailed 'Source' URL for a post control whether a full post URL or a 'Source' shortcut is displayed.
Related Readings list is processed for ATOM posts.
Links to feed posts that were already downloaded from (other) feeds are shown with a small icon link. Clicking on it directly navigates to the existing Omea resource. A tooltip over the icon shows actual (downloaded) post title.
New filter Only Feeds with Unread Items (via menu View | Filter Feeds) leaves only feeds which contain unread items in the Feeds pane.
New filter Feeds with Errors (via menu View | Filter Feeds) leaves only feeds which were downloaded with problems in the Feeds pane.
Run Enclosure Program command in the context menu allows to directly start an application associated with the particular type of the downloaded enclosure.
Delete Enclosure command in the context menu allows to directly delete an enclosure file.
Pause Updating Feeds/Resume Updating Feeds actions work also for feed folders.
Sphere RSS search engine is integrated into the list of supported search feeds.

Notes Plugin

A completely new plugin to store short notes and extracts. Universal shortcut Ctrl-Shift-N creates a new Note in any tab.

GUI/Usability Issues

Annotate and Categorize Bookmark and Create Clipping dialogs are completely redesigned for more compact information representation and more usable access to the categories tree.
Export a list of resources into text/html/xml formats.
It is possible to set a flag as well in the Create Clipping dialog.
Remember last setting in the Formatting dialog for Watch the Conversation coloring.
Show total count of items in the RSS feed, Newsgroup, feed or newsgroup Folder, and Category via Show Total Items Count item in the context menu.
Search Selected Text context menu item performs immediate search of the selected text in all Omea resources.
Omea offers to restart itself if options changes require that.
Omea now performs automatic database backups on the daily basis (in the idle mode).
Select Category dialog now contains a checkbox to narrow down the set of available categories in a particular workspace when working in it.
Plugins options page contains controls for displaying plugin's author and description.

New in Omea Pro 2.1

Outlook Plugin

Attachments are categorized along with their container emails. Before we could not see attachment resources staying on some category in Views and Categories pane
Empty Address Books are also shown in the address books list
Possibility to save attachments over read-only files
Possibility to send attachments without preliminary saving to disk
New distinctive icon for mails with attached resources
Outlook Meetings are now separate resources, definitely separated from ordinary mails. Omea can now open them in Outlook via Enter key or double-click, visually it is designated with a separate icon
Email attached to other emails are now can be directly opened
Several options which automate assigning of categories to mails
Save email message(s) as text file
Expiration rules for Outlook folders
Fixed a bug with dragging a whole conversation containing attachments to some Outlook folder
NUMEROUS other bug fixes

NNTP Plugin

Options: Mark all read on exit and Mark all read on Leave for a newsgroup
News server option in the Posting tab: On Send, put articles in Outbox rather than post immediately. If the option is checked, posted articles will live in Outbox until user manually send them via the Send/Receive button on the News tab toolbar
More strict logic is implemented for controlling the resources deletion
What this generally means is that there will be no possibility for a user to accidentally delete articles permanently — either with the help of a rule or via keyboard
Highly optimized Replies to my posts condition
Watch Conversation — possibility to create a special formatting for a subthread, specifying its head
Stop updating thread — possibility to delete all subsequent news articles which belong to the specified (sub)thread
In order to support more servers with custom behaviour, messages posted by Omea contain the Date header
Fixed issue not allowing to post to the News.Giganews.com server

RSS Plugin

Create Feed Folder on the top level not only in the Subscription Manager
Completely redesigned export of feed subscriptions
Option Auto update feed comments is moved from popup menu to a Properties dialog for a feed
Fixed bug with illegal importing of OPML files into Omea
"Move a feed to Feed Folder" menu item for "keyboarders"
Option to show feed's FavIcon as the primary icon of the feed post, both in resource list and in newspaper
Unified progress display for feeds downloading in the status bar
In Newspaper view — a new icon for Enclosure status
Ability to pause the updating of the RSS Feed for an arbitrary period of time. Feed title becomes a little bit "grayed" and a "PAUSE" icon indicates its status
In 2.0 there was only one column for showing the origin of the feed — “Author, Weblog”. Now ordinary columns “From” and “Weblog” are additionally added
New option for a feed “Accept equal posts”. We use several techniques for dealing with posts identical to previously posted in the case of e.g. the change of RSS engine. This prevented normal working of different domestic RSS generating engines for which it is normal to issue posts with equal subjects and bodies

RSS Search Engines

The following search engines have been added:
- MSN Search
- BlogPulse
- Google Blog Search
- IceRocket
Possibility to subscribe to any number of search feeds at once

Tasks

Possibility to create Sub/Super task relationship. This is done via drag'n'drop in the To Do pane
Added some formatting for finished and overdue tasks
Support for Deferred status of the task
Task Importance column is now pictorial (instead of textual)
Clicking on the importance icon changes the task status in circle
Task Status column is now pictorial (instead of textual). That is (following the order in the column): deferred, waiting, not started, in progress, complete.
Task Edit dialog was redesigned to structurize the task-related information:
- Single form was split into several tabs
- Date controls were redesigned so that they are usable both from keyboard, mouse and stick (for tablets)
When creating a task from a resource the current selected text is automatically put into the task's description

IMs

Save into file and send by mail multiselected IM conversations

Contacts Plugin

Correspondence is shown for ALL selected contacts in the Correspondents pane (before only for the first one)

Filter Condition/Views/Rules

Separate conditions:
- From or To contact
- From contact
- To contact
RSS condition: Post is in the search feed
RSS condition: Post is a comment
RSS condition: Post is a comment from blog's author
News condition: Message is a reply in a flagged thread
Two news conditions: Message has a reply and Message is a reply".
As an example of usage “highlight all news articles which nobody has answered to yet”
View Next Week for Tasks
A very special condition: “Contact has correspondence”. Condition is true for those contacts which have at least one related news article or feed post, including those which are deleted and may be found in the Deleted Resources View
Expiration rules now may be configured so that they do not touch categorized resources as well

GUI/Usability Issues

Ability to sort feeds, newsgroups and tasks (in the To Do pane) via drag'n'drop
Toggle Read/Unread state by clicking on the resource button
Ability to delete annotations for multiple resources simultaneously
Select/Unselect buttons in many places
Corrected buttons behavior in the Subscribe to Feed dialog
Most TextBox controls were changed so that Ctrl+A and Ctrl+Backspace work properly
Tab key from Views and Categories pane moved nowhere, now — to the resource browser list
Option for regulating the amount of time the notification window stays on top
Possibility to customize the color of notification window
“Delete” button on the notification window
Support “Display Threaded” and “Hide Read Messages” in categories (Views and Categories pane)
Ability change the icon for the category so that it appears both in Views and Categories pane and in the resource browser list
Toolbar icons for turning on/off groupping and for choosing the location of preview panel - bottom or right
Alt+F1 key for switching the visibility of left sidebar on/off
Problem of views duplication when dragging them in the Views Manager is fixed
Possibility to change greeting string for news
Possibility to change fonts for major resource types
Possibility to reorder Workspaces
“Show Clipping” and “Annotate Resource” dialogs are redesigned. Added a possibility to create a new category from any place where it might be necessary

FireFox Plugin

Support of Firefox 1.5 is implemented

Text Index

New menu item in Actions menu — Pause/Resume text indexing. This allows user to have more explicit control over the Omea's (and the computer) performance

Optimizations

Reduced memory consumption
Reduced hard disk reading/writing
Improved multithreading and UI responsiveness
Reduced startup and closing time
Optimized for running on multiprocessor or hyper-threaded computers
Feed updating consumes less system resources
Self-organizing database (in idle mode) for faster queries

Omea-Wide Changes

Opening a link in a new Web browser window is now performed asynchronously, so that Omea won't hang if the Web browser or some other application is not responding at the moment
Drag'n'drop reordering of resource trees: it's now possible to change the order of items in the lists and trees with the mouse, as well as reset the user order back to lexicographical sorting

Open Issues

Features and bug fixes covered in this section are to be finished before 2.1 release
Show view only in the predefined workspace(s). Currently user can specify that in the Edit View dialog directly, but there is some logic behind to put it into Manage Workspaces dialog
Configure set of prefixes (like "RE" or "FW") to be ignored when sorting by subject
Reordering in the Views and Categories pane
Crashes in text index. We still have problems in reproducing this
Incorrect parsing of URLs in news articles
Exceptions in Replies to news articles. Most of these exceptions are related to .Net 2.0 and the lack of testing under it
Skipping RSS posts with equal description string
News articles encoding issues
Performance, performance, performance...
Bug fixes

New in Omea Pro 2.0

Omea Pro 2.0 provides multiple improvements and changes for working with it compared with its previous version. This chapter covers the main changes and provides the links to other help topics where you can read more about the new features and possibilities. If you are a new Omea user, you may firstly want to familiarize yourself with the basics of Omea Pro and later refer to this chapter to learn about the features which appeared in the new version of Omea. If you have already worked with Omea before, you can use this page as an entry point to navigate to the new features description.

General Improvements

Omea Pro 2.0 includes many other improvements in different areas of the product:

New user interface
Performance and memory usage improvements
Robustness and error recovery of the database and text index
Possibility to change the position of the preview pane (bottom or on the right as in Outlook 2003 style)
“Deleted Resources” view allows to view and recover resources deleted in Omea
“Delete Confirmations” options pane allows to specify whether resource deletion needs to be confirmed by the user
“Default Application” options allows you to make Omea a default application for reading newsgroups and feeds

Organizational Features Improvements

“Category” column displays the categories of resources you are currently working with
Possibility to show the contents of subcategories when you select a category in the Views and Categories pane
“Unread counters” in Workspace bar not only show the number of resources which you haven't read yet, but are clickable allowing you to navigate to the unread resources in both All and custom workspaces
Possibility to assign a color to a workspace, so that it's always easy to see in which workspace you currently are
Improved user interface for notifications message boxes (with possibility to move to the next or previous notification message)

Browser Integration

Omea 2.0 includes plugins for Internet Explorer and Mozilla/Firefox that will allow you to organize Web pages without leaving the browser.

The plugins provide the following possibilities:

Subscribe to feed of the currently viewed page in Mozilla and Firefox and Internet Explorer
Create Clipping from the text selected in the page in Mozilla and Firefox and Internet Explorer
Create a bookmark from the currently browsed web page, assign a Category to that bookmark and add textual note to it in Mozilla and Firefox and Internet Explorer.

NNTP Plugin

Omea Pro 2.0 includes an NNTP plugin with the following new features:

Better performance and reduced number of server connections
Possibility to organize newsgroups in folders
Support for SSL connections
Support for canceling articles on the server
Support for compressing (abbreviating) newsgroup names and specifying custom display names
Per-server configuration of all server properties
Better download control options
Support for news URLs
Improved newsgroup subscription dialog with possibility to view new newsgroups which appeared on the newsserver
Support for “Deleted Resources” (recycle bin for news articles)
Possibility to keep the article archive when unsubscribing from a newsgroup
Possibility to switch encodings for downloaded articles
Possibility to save the newsgroup posts
A new form for creating new posts and replying the posts with possibility to insert attachments
Possibility to customize the properties of several news servers
Expiring newsgroups posts (see, Newsgroups Options dialog and Expiration Rule Dialog)
Other changes and improvements

Outlook Plugin Features

Possibility to work with different message stores - copy folders and messages and move them to different folders and message stores
Possibility to save messages as .MSG files
Possibility to turn off category synchronization for contacts, tasks and emails
Possibility to save all attachments which an e-mail message contains
Possibility to view Outlook folders in threaded mode

RSS Plugin Features

Possibility to subscribe to a feed by dragging an URL from a browser and dropping it on the Feeds pane
Improved dialog for importing subscriptions with possibility to import feed subscriptions from RSS Bandit, SharpReader, and FeedDemon and previewing the feed subscriptions
Working with Feed Enclosures (podcasting)
Support for "Deleted Resources" (“Recycle Bin” for feed posts)
Possibility to subscribe to several feeds at once
Possibility to subscribe to search feeds
Possibility to organize the feeds using Feed Folders
Possibility to edit the properties of several feeds, or all feeds in a feed folder
Expiring feed posts (see, Feed Options dialog and Expiration Rule Dialog)
New newspaper view for feeds (with possibility to filter the feed posts which you want to browse, defining the number of feed posts per page, annotate the feed post, or mark the feed posts with flags when reading it in the newspaper view)
Possibility to auto update feed comments
Posting new comments to the feed using the built-in editor
Possibility to export feed subscriptions and share them with other people
Display of favicon.ico files for RSS feeds
Feeds icons are now displayed in the Feeds pane
Possibility to save the feed posts
New option “Mark all items read when leaving the feed”
New option to automatically follow the link in an RSS post when the post is selected
Possibility to send cookies from browser (IE or Mozilla) cache when downloading RSS feeds
Possibility to view Clippings as Newspaper

New Message List/Tree Control

Omea Tokaj includes improved possibilities for displaying lists and trees of resources. It is currently used in the following places:

Main resource browser
Panes in the left sidebar
“Choose Resource Types” dialog
“Select Conditions” dialog
“Views Manager” dialog
“Rules Manager” dialog for ALL types of rules available in Omea with possibility to reorder and turn the rules on and off and create copies of rules

Viewing improvements:

Auto-preview support
Grouping support

The following new column configuration features have been added (see, “Configure Columns” dialog):

“Show if not empty” and “Show if distinct” options for showing columns
Column autosizing
Double-click the column splitter to expand the column
Possibility to apply column settings to a specific view, instead of all views showing resources of specific types
Possibility to restore default column settings

Search, Rules and Views Improvements

Rules for changing Omea's tray icon
“Apply Rules” dialog allows to choose the resources to which rules will be applied, and its performance has been improved;
“Hide Read Messages” option for Views (right-click the View in the Views and Categories pane or newsgroup or feed group in Newsgroups or Feeds pane respectively)
Added search history in the Advanced Search dialog
Better diagnostics for incorrect search queries and stopwords/stoptokens
Better incremental search implementation
Possibility to restrict the search using the names of the document sections
New conditions in Select Conditions dialog (for customizing Views and Rules):
- Author has an RSS Feed
- Author posted a news article
- Author wrote an RSS post
- From, To or CC with contact
- With the following category(ies) and its subcategories
- Email is of specified importance
- Post is a reply in my thread
- Resource is a clipping
- Resource is categorized
- Resource is deleted
- Enclosure downloading is completed
- Enclosure downloading is failed
- Enclosure downloading is planned
- Enclosure is not downloaded
- Enclosure is of specified type
- Enclosure size is in range
- Post has an enclosure
- Post has comment(s)
- Task reminder is dated by timespan
- Last correspondence is received during period
- Subject contains text
New Rule Actions in the Select Rule Actions dialog:
- Delete Resource
- Delete Resource Permanently
- Download Enclosure
- Set specified importance

Bookmarks Support Improvements

Omea Pro 2.0 provides:

Full bookmark synchronization with Mozilla and Firefox (both import and export of bookmarks)
Support for importing Opera bookmarks
Display of favicons for bookmarked Web pages
Possibility to send cookies from browser (IE, Mozilla, and Firefox) cache when downloading bookmarks

Contact Management Improvements

When removing email account from a Contact, all correspondence related to the email account is retargeted to the newly created contact
Possibility to delete contacts by pressing Del(ete) and ignore the incoming correspondence from the contact
Possibility to assign contact categories to contacts using the “Edit Contact” dialog

Excel Plugin

Omea Tokaj includes a plugin for viewing and indexing Microsoft Excel files.