Omea Reader Help: What's New in Omea Reader

New in Omea Reader 2.2

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 Reader 2.1

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

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”
• 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 and newsgroups 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 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 grouping 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 the 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

• 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 Reader 2.0

Omea Reader 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 Reader 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 Reader 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 are now 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 Reader 2.0 includes a rewritten 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 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

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 (feed “attachments”)
• 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 folders
• 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
• 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 Reader 2.0 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
  • 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)
  • 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 Reader 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