JetBrains Releases Omea Reader
Leader in intelligent developer tools applies expertise to its first consumer product
October 04, 2004
PRAGUE, Czech Republic, October 4, 2004 – JetBrains™, Inc., creators of intelligent, productivity-enhancing tools, today announced the general availability of its first consumer-oriented product, Omea Reader. The program, free through December, is an intelligently designed tool to find, prioritize, display and manage information supplied through RSS and ATOM news feeds, do the same for news groups, and keep the user’s web browser bookmarks updated.
RSS, a term now widely accepted as standing for “Really Simple Syndication,” is used by companies, “bloggers,” news sites and other content providers to reach audiences that select them. They are increasingly popular, in part because they eliminate the time-wasting spam of traditional email channels. The total number of RSS feeds now numbers in the millions and is growing quickly.
Omea Reader helps users cope with “info-smog,” where the sheer density of information obscures what a user is looking for. The program serves as a very convenient approach to monitor breaking news in RSS/ATOM feeds and manage newsgroup feeds, saving users enormous amounts of “seek time.”
“Like other JetBrains products, Omea Reader originally came about as a way to meet our own needs internally,” said Eugene Belyaev, President and Chief Technology Officer at JetBrains. “It is part of a larger, more general project we undertook to help us manage the torrents of information we all have to deal with as participants in the information economy. Since we are hardly alone in the information deluge, it made sense to make these tools available to a wider audience.”
RSS and newsgroup readers have been around for some time, but lack the robust information management capability that makes Omea Reader a superior tool in the face of increasing information overload. For example, it allows users to categorize on-line information resources in the ways most useful to them, rather than having to flip back and forth between different programs in an effort to coordinate multiple streams of information. A single click brings the user to any useful category of information, even when it comes from a mix of sources, and a unique “Clippings” feature helps create excerpts from the larger information flow that users can access, search, index or link to other clips or working documents. The “I know I saw it somewhere” sinking feeling is eliminated.
Similarly, most users have web browser bookmark collections that rapidly fall out of date. Omea Reader checks a user’s web browser bookmarks and informs them when the site content has changed. Omea Reader also detects and updates redirected web addresses, alerts users to dead links and provides them with the last version of the web-page.
Omea Reader’s built-in NNTP newsgroup reader comes with full support for both reading and posting messages to newsgroups, support for attachments, and inline display of pictures. Omea Reader also provides a convenient threaded view so users can easily track comments throughout a discussion.
Omea Reader utilizes all features of the HTTP protocol to conserve bandwidth, addressing one of the key issues of readers overall. When supported by the server, it also uses compression to further reduce bandwidth demands, which have become a problem for many RSS/ATOM publishers. An automatic subscription wizard keeps users in touch with feeds they want without wasting space, time or bandwidth.
Omea Reader Features
Key features of Omea Reader:
- Manages content display efficiently – more content does not mean more clutter
- Intelligently combines functions – reads and manages RSS feeds, next-generation feeds in the advanced ATOM format, content from newsgroups and even the user’s personal Web bookmarks, all in a single, easy-to-use interface
- Contextual access through customized workspace views of data from multiple sources, enables user-defined filtering, filing and accessing information via categories and clearly defined workspaces
- Easy-to-use wizard locates and subscribes to relevant feeds
- “Newspaper view” makes scanning posts fast and easy by displaying, not only the headlines, but also the content of posts on a single page
- Full support for both reading and posting to weblogs, with automatic reference tracking between posts
- Provides full range of organization capabilities, including flags, annotations and automatic notifications, so users can mark interesting items and quickly return to them later
- Creates clippings to extract small interesting bits of information from larger documents and retain them in searchable, linkable form
- Conserves bandwidth by downloading only new material from news feeds and by taking advantage of feed compression when the feed source supports it
As a limited time offer, until January, 1st 2005, JetBrains Omea Reader will be available for free at https://www.jetbrains.com/omea_reader.
About JetBrains, Inc.
JetBrains, Inc. is a technology-leading software development firm specializing in the creation of intelligent, productivity-enhancing software. The company is widely known for its innovative, award-winning Java integrated development environment, IntelliJ IDEA (see details on the Web at https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/). JetBrains maintains its headquarters in Prague, Czech Republic, with its R&D labs located in St. Petersburg, Russia and Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, see https://www.jetbrains.com.
JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Omea and Omea Reader are trademarks or registered trademarks of JetBrains, Inc. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.
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