Forum Posts Feed
Omea Pro 3 - to be released
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Mar 6, 2008 at 11:57 PM
Stephen, I also would like an answer to this question.
I have no need for Outlook, but would appreciate hearing the experience of someone who has used Omea without using Outlook.
Is there someone—anyone—out there who can respond?
Thanks.
Daly
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>I don’t think I got an answer to my question regarding Omea Pro, so I’d like to ask it
>again. Does Omea have any value for someone who doesn’t use Outlook, or is all the power
>in its coordination with Outlook?
>
>Thanks!
>
>Steve Z.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 7, 2008 at 10:32 AM
Hi Stephen (and Daly)
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Does Omea have any value for someone who doesn’t use Outlook, or is all the power
>in its coordination with Outlook?
I’m not sure anyone can answer that question; Omea Pro appears to be completely tied to Outlook only as far as email is concerned “You can work with email in Omea Pro IF you have one of the following versions of Microsoft Outlook⢠installed on your PC” ( http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/features/moremail.html ) However, I have not tried it for myself to be certain.
Nevertheless, I would argue that even if you don’t use Outlook as your main e-mail application, you may still have it installed as part of MS Office and use it in parallel by (a) not deleting messages from the server and (b) BCCing any important messages you send to yourself. I have done this in the past when I dealt with mass personalised e-mails through an application that only worked with Outlook. I then used Outlook only to send the messages, and received them back in my main e-mail program (The Bat!).
In other respects, Omea Pro works directly with the file system and stuff like RSS feeds. For bookmark management, it supports most popular browsers. For instant messaging, it only works with Miranda and ICQ.
So I guess that it depends on how much e-mail is part of your workflow (it is certainly a great part of mine) to not worry about maintaining it in a separate system.
alx
Posted by Dan360
Apr 28, 2008 at 02:03 PM
I keep going back to the Omea Pro site to try and find any info on the new 3.0 release. They still keep the 3.0 release notes well hidden. Here is the link to the latest. http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/OMEA/Omea+Grenache+Release+Notes
Unfortunately the latest hasnt been updated since March 24th. Oh the tease.
Does anyone have any other info on this potential super organizer info system extraordinaire?
PIMfan wrote:
>I’ll chime in on this one. I use Ultra Recall, EverNote, previously tried Zoot and am
>yet another Ecco devotee. But for all my CRIMPing tendencies, I would dump all the
>tools I currently use for a stable release of Omea Pro.
>
>What makes it so compelling?
>No other tool I’ve ever used has provided the level of integration with MS Outlook that
>Omea Pro does. I work in a corporate environment and am forced to use Outlook whether I
>like it or not. Therefore, much of the tasking and work that I do comes from:
>
>a) An
>email request to do something
>b) An Outlook task assigned to me
>c) A phone call
>conversation that results in a request to work on something
>d) An action item from a
>meeting I attended
>
>Omea cleanly integrates all of the sources of information into
>one spot and allows you to easily link and relate items.
>
>In addition, I perform
>technical reseach on subjects related to tasking I receive. So I need to collect web
>clippings, read newgroups, generate notes from what I learn, and produce
>documentation/reports on technical issues. I store documents on my computer in
>addition to gathering from external sources. What Omea lets me do is to create a
>“workspace” that I will collect ALL information related to a particular subject. I
>can create categorization rules and then use them to automatically assign items to
>the appropriate workspace based upon a wide variety of keywords or conditions. Omea
>also allows me to automatically create virtual links between items in my workspace.
>Other tools I’ve used have all had some of the abilities of Omea Pro, but none of them
>leverages MS Outlook like Omea. Both Zoot and UR can “connect” with MS Outlook, but
>when you use Omea, the integration is the cleanest I’ve seen. The videos on the
>JetBrains website give a good sense of how one works in the Omea environment.
>
>A
>sample scenario for me:
>An email arrives in my Outlook mailbox and if I’ve created a
>rule to assign the message to a category in my project workspace, it instantly appears
>in my workspace. No need to run a “synch” job, no “select the message and click the send
>to other app button” type activity needed. Once the message arrives, I read it in my
>workspace, and I can simply drag it to the task bar to create a task from the email. Say I
>then need to do some research on the subject of the email. I then open a browser and do
>some google work to get information. As I do so, I’m adding the URL’s of the websites
>with useful information to my workspace. In addition, I’m clipping some of the web
>content and placing into the workspace also. As I do so, I’m also linking the URLs and
>clippings to the task I created. Say I then start generating a Word document reporting
>on what I’ve found. The Word doc is also in the workspace, and I associate it also to the
>original task. Then perhaps I schedule a meeting to review the work I’ve done with a
>co-worker. I schedule the meeting using Outlook, and since the subject of the meeting
>is “Project 1 review”, Omea instantly assigns it to my workspace for Project 1.
>Because Omea leverages Outlook, the task I created in Omea for my project is available
>on my Windows Mobile device, and I can take all my notes and work done to date with me to my
>meetings.
>
>Again, do other apps hook into Outlook and do the web clippy/link
>collector stuff? Sure. But I really like the Omea interface, the workspace concept,
>and the fact that when I work with Outlook data in Omea, I don’t feel like I’m working in a
>different app. An Outlook task viewed in Omea LOOKS like an Outlook task - just on
>steriods…
>
>If it’s so great, what’s the problem? The biggest issue is the
>oft-discussed lack of support for Omea by the JetBrains upper management. Omea Pro is
>an INCREDIBLE tool, but the company management has never properly promoted or
>marketed it. Omea did require some continued development to address some issues (it
>could be a CPU hog, and had a number of problems). While JetBrains also make code
>development tools, Omea caters to a different (and wider) audience than development
>tools. But they seemed to not understand how to establish Omea in the PIM world. Due to
>these production positioning deficiencies, sales were apparently not what
>JetBrians envisioned, so they decided to stop “official” development and instead
>release it as open source. Except…..it never happened and Omea languished quietly
>in a dark corner of JetBrains for over a year. Michael Gerasimov has been spending his
>own time working on getting it converted to the latest version of the .NET frameworks,
>but no official company effort is being applied to it. As Dan noted, it appears that
>there has been some recent work done on the update, which is quite encouraging.
>
>My
>experience on this board is that all of us have tools that meet our needs to organize and
>gather our work and information. In my personal situation, Omea Pro does this to a
>level I’ve never been able to achieve with any other app. I lament the fact that I cannot
>justify my data to an app that is not supported, but if it truly is upgraded and open
>sourced, I will drop everything else for it.
>
>As an Omea Pro fan, I sometimes feel like
>the guy who gets dumped by his hot girlfriend and never gets over her, spending his time
>thinking about what “could have been”, and always comparing every other experience
>to her. Pretty sad.
>
>That concludes my dissertation. Thanks, I feel a lot better
>having brain dumped on this…...
>
>PIMfan
>
>Tom S. wrote:
>>Dan,
>>
>>I took a look.
>I’ve seen the program before. But I’m having a little bit of a hard
>>time determining
>what makes it unique. Can you tell me what sets it apart from
>>something like Zoot or
>Ultrarecall?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Tom S.
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Apr 30, 2008 at 02:53 PM
This ongoing discussion re OmeaPro has shown two things: a) There’s a product out there that has the potential of being the holy grail of PIMs (almost what Chandler was to be before it died, and which has shown it can work, and (b) the company that makes it somehow lacks the vision to realize what they are sitting on, so it has been left on the wayside, although it has found a champion in the employee ranks who works on it.
Everyone of us who has dreamed of the kind of functionality that PIMfan attributes to OmeaPro should write the company, and tell them what they appear to have been unaware of—that they have a product with incredible potential.
I like UR for some things; for clipping I find Evernote now does the most accurate job a few percentage points ahead of UR and Surfulater.
Working with writing projects and my own ADHD I need a product that gives me a really handy dashboard or central place for everything.
I have even been trialing the latest version of the Brain again, but I find the constant movement of the arms too distracting after a while, and my monkey mind gets caught up on what arms I am *not* seeing (crazy, I know). But the Brain does bring all kinds of docs together in one place.
I have given IDEA the most serious trial yet—and there is a lot that I like, but I need the pro version—and frankly, I am not willing to pay out $165 for a product that hasn’t apparently been developed for two or three years. I left a msg on the forum asking about that question.
IDEA is a very simple and elegant product once you understand it. I set up about 10 records (projects or gateways to workspaces) in half an hour. A record is a gateway to a workspace because once a records is selected in the lower right quad, all docs, applications, whatever, associated with it appears in the upper rt quad.
IDEA is a product that ought not be allowed to die.
Because what IDEA and OmeaPro offer besides different features, is one important difference between UR, MI, and other similar products—that is that there is no need to pull in information. It works with what is there. Why did we get fascinated with programs that pull in info in the first place, except to have a way of organizing it and having it together when we needed it. Web clipping, we did it also to have an easy way of clipping from the web and filing what we clipped. Much of what I have in Evernote right now is not web-based, and could be a word processing file linked easily to any number of projects in OmeaPro or Idea.
I have begun wondering seriously whether I can make my own solution. Working with FreeMind and MindGenius (simply to be able to compare the value added of a very expensive program with a very adequate program that is free), I believe I can come up with something that is quite satisfactory, that will also allow a way to planning that none of the other programs discussed offer.
For outlining where I need it, if all of this moves ahead, I will probably use either MI or ndxCards on a stick.
I am doing a lot of quick and dirty writing based essentially on daily news items, op ed pieces, etc., and I find NoteZilla pro product with all of its memo boards, etc., as well as the best quick note making, drafting, writing combination I have seen so far for non academic stuff is ideal.
There’s one academic project I am using IdeaMason for, and at the end of the project will have a better perspective of IM. Yet, a lot of the preliminary work on that is best suited to IDEA, and perhaps to OmeaPro, which I will again look at.
I could probably stand to live with Outlook, but I am not sure I want to pay for it either.
However, for free, the program Thunderbird, which I have always used, though mostly I used Gmail now, will allow several hundred different plug-ins, some of which are really interesting and worthwhile. One of them allows me to click on an email url, and instead of being carried to a browser, see the url page within Tbird which opens a new tab. I have always found going back and forth between the email cl and browser a major pita.
Anyhow, back to OmeaPro and IDEA—would be great to hear from their developers what the plans are. Both programs have incredible potential.
Daly