Omea to go Open Source!
We received some welcome news about the future of Omea in early December from Jetbrains. Michael Gerasimov, posting for the Jetbrains Omea Team, told us the following:
Dear Omea users,
After collecting your opinions and having long internal
discussions, we have finally decided to move both Omea Reader and Omea Pro
into the open source domain.
This will definitely take some time, but the
first step has already been made - from now on, Omea Pro is available free
of charge!
Thank you for your input, and you are welcome to contribute to
Omea Pro development when it goes open-source.
I feel a little bit of personal responsibility for causing some of those long discussions. Early in November, I was extremely frustrated with my inability to dig out of a deep well of to-dos and scattered information. I had been forced to back off my use of Omea Pro because I was uncertain of its future and didn't want to continue to invest time organizing information in a tool that might be a dead end. After weeks of searching (fruitlessly) for something similar, I finally went a little nutso on the Omea discussion group. The following post got more reaction than I thought it would, and expresses my frustration at the time:
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I'm convinced that Omea Pro was developed just to torment me.
It's the best information management product I've ever seen, tightly tied to
market-dominant tools where it makes sense, but with a unifying classification
structure and workspaces that allow one to successfully navigate the torrent of
information that pours in on a daily basis.
I've searched all over for products which would allow me to manage the
information overload that comes with my business, and I found Omea over a year
ago after going through product after product which didn't meet my needs.
Onfolio, Outlook, Clear Context, Ultra Recall, etc, etc... all met with a brief
flurry of excitement and then found wanting.
When I found Omea Pro, I thought I had finally discovered the promised land.
Sure, there wasn't a calendar, but it tied to my file structure and email tools
and allowed me to pull together all the disparate elements of information I need
to do my job into nicely segmentable workspaces. It helped me turn noise into a
signal, chaos into order. Information management nirvana was at hand.
But, no, development resources were pulled so that Jetbrains could focus on
other niches. It looks like some developers still work on the product when they
can, but it's been placed far down on their priority list.
So, I can view the promised land, but can not live there. I've had to abandon
Omea Pro not because it's somehow inferior to other available tools, but because
I don't have confidence that it will be carried into the future. I check these
newsgroups every couple of weeks, hoping to see some indication that Jetbrains
has decided to invest in the product and that an even-cooler Omea Pro 3.0 is on
the way.
But no, there's nothing, other than unanswered questions.
(Sigh)
I've seen the future, and it says "Outlook 2007" on it. The future sucks.
The post got about 20 responses, which is pretty high for the jetbrains.omea.pro newsgroup, and apparently helped kick off some activity on the Omea front at Jetbrains. With Omea heading toward the land of open source, it's time for me to bone up on C# and put my time where my newsgroups posts are, and start to see if I can help nudge this tremendous application forward. The future suddenly looks more productive and fun.