It’s pretty rare that I get excited about a software program when I first try it out, but the Omea Reader from Jet Brains definitely got my attention.
It uses a “dashboard” style of interface to handle bookmarks, feeds, newsgroups and contacts in one handy place and then lets you easily annotate, flag, link and organize all of this items through categories, views, rules and the like. It’s quite impressive and provides much of the functionality I’ve wanted to see in a personal knowledge management tool.
Here’s the description from Jet Brains:
“Omea is an extremely powerful yet simple to use Integrated Information Environment. With Omea, you can access, organize, and quickly search all your digital resources, including e-mails, syndicated Web feeds, instant messaging conversations, newsgroup articles, favorite web sites, personal contacts, and even locally stored files (.doc, .pdf, .txt, etc.), all in one easy to use composite interface that’s well organized and efficient to navigate.”
The Omea Reader is free since it is in its Public Beta phase (I crashed it a couple of times with some aggressive use, but I remained undeterred).
Thanks to Shimon Rura who lead me to Omea Reader.
I’ll give my usual caveat that your experience with any tool in the “personal KM” category will depend on your preferences and requirements. Omea, after just a few days, appears to hit a number of my biggest needs and has a tool set that fits me well. I’d like to see more than one color of flag, but I suspect that its rules and views will accomplish more than simple flagging can.
You might want to check this one out before fawning all over the Google Desktop, which struck me as being vastly overrated. I’ve liked the lightning fast LookOut for desktop search for quite a while. Google’s security and privacy track record still makes me wary of jumping into any Google release early on.