There are many, many feed readers around. Many people didn’t know which of these feed readers they should use. The answer is not so simple: it will depend of what your needs are. There are many type of feed readers. Some are web based, others are integrated in already know environment like outlook, others are addins for Mozilla or Internet Explorer and finally others are standalone software that works on Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
Personally feeds reading now take an important place in my everyday life. I’m subscribed to more than half hundred feeds of any sorts. So I need a robust software that can work easily with thousands of posts without corrupt them. So given these needs I tested many standalone feed reader softwares. I now only use my laptop computer. I carry it everywhere to see my clients, at the coffee shop, at my friends’ houses, etc. So I’m restricted to a 15″, non wide laptop screen. Given this feature, I need to have the possibility to have the maximum of spaces to read my posts.
I tested many of these softwares but only one is filling all these requirements: Omea Reader. Many people will think that I can be crazy with my requirements; that I should not reject software only for a little problem. They are probably right, but now I use my feed reader much more than my email program; I use it many times a day, so it need to be exactly what I need otherwise it will make me mad.
So, why I took Omea Reader? I use it since 5 months now and it work as a charm. This software fills all the above discussed requirements:
- His look is modern, beautiful and simple. It’s smooth and not aggressive. It’s a charm to read hours with it.
- The software is robust. It never crashed while I was reading my post. I have a database of around 15000 posts and I never saw a corrected one.
- It took as many computer resources as Firefox, Acrobat Reader or Maxthon so it’s acceptable in my case.
- I can easily setup the control panels to have a maximum space to look at my posts without always clicking on buttons to show and hide panels. It’s the best organization I saw (it’s a really personal opinion).
All these features are filled by Omea Reader. But the most beautiful features aren’t listed bellow. Omea is probably the feed reader who gives you the best possibility to manage the way you see your feeds’ posts. Why? Because he work with a views system. You have only one entry for every post that is archived by Omea. But this post can be see by more than one view. So with these views you can restrict, with categories, which posts you want to read. This is the only feed reader I saw that worked like this and it’s the most powerful feature of Omea: the way you can manage your information.
What’s a good feed reader without a search engine? There is an advanced search engine included in Omea. It uses the same view system. So when you perform searches in your posts, a new view will be created with searches’ results. So you can easily, without adding entries to your database, keep the results of your searches. Is that not so beautiful?
There are also 2 other really cool features I like: the flags and the annotations. You have the possibility to flag posts. By example, I put a green flag on posts that I comment, I put blue flags on posts where I find a beautiful quote, I put red flag on important posts, etc. So I can easily, through a view, find where I posted comments, where I found good quotes, etc.
Annotations are as important as flags because it give you the power to annotate, with personal idea, incoming posts. So you can, in the future, look at what you thought about this post, etc. It?s also a really interesting feature for bloggers because you can annotate post that you’ll blog about in the future.
It’s how and why I use Omea Reader. It’s sure that this post is really personal. I didn’t mention other feed reader because I didn’t want to compare Omea with others, to say that Omea is better than this one, this one or this one. Why? Because the use of a specific feed reader depend of your needs. For me, Omea is the best I know and it’s why I used it since 5 months.
It’s sure that I forgot to talk about features (because I didn’t know them or I didn’t use them) but feel free to tell us how you use it, I’ll be really happy to ear it!
Don’t forget that you have a free license until the 31 mars 2005. But if it’s like past months, they will extend it to the next month, and the next month, etc? ๐