I've been playing around with Omea Reader from JetBrains for the past couple of days and I must say, I'm pretty impressed as this is a v 1.0 product.  While it's not a killer _new_ app, it's definitely killer in that it combines features from many different apps I use on a daily basis into one tidy, consistent, intuitive package.  On top of that, if Shannon likes it then it must be good :-)  I find the interface to be pretty snappy and intelligent, everything is right where it should be...and if it's not, then it doesn't take too long to find it.  I haven't had to glance at the help docs too much, and I would consider this application to be moderately complex.  Sorry FeedDemon, but I've met your successor, and his name is Omea.

Here is a (non-laundry) list of bugs I've found so far:

• Deleting a feed group (folder) on the feeds tab doesn't prompt for confirmation...it simply deletes the folder with no recourse.  This has shown itself to be a pain in the arse more than once for me.
• Any action that uses the Outlook compose mail form (i.e. replying to sender/forwarding from the news tab) displays the mail form modally.  This is a pain as sometimes I need to cut and paste text from other posts/feeds in Omea.  The native Omea New and Reply forms are not displayed modally...so this could be an issue with Outlook's API for using mail forms, but I wouldn't think so.  This is a high priority bug for me as I frequently need to cut and paste other information from Omea into mail forms.
• The CHM help file is displayed modally.  Kind of tough to follow steps when you can't go to the Omea interface to carry them out.
• Pretty high resource utilization.  My Omea folder (with the DB and indexes) is approaching 400 megs, and memory consumption fluctuates widely between 15-100 megs.  Minimizing to the systray helps, but that doesn't do me much good when I need to use the app.  I would like to see an option for “trimming“ newsgroup items down to a specific number of posts, automatically deleting older posts as they cap a user defined limit.  Not a show stopper as storage is cheap, but I've seen other readers do this more effeciently.
• “Quick Find“ on the web tab doesn't search sub-folders in the favorites folder...it only searches the top level folder you're searching in.  That being said, this is a nice feature as I have tons of bookmarks and really no way of searching through them for content.
• Pop-up notifications don't stay visible when being hovered on by the mouse pointer.  If it begins to fade, mousing over has no effect on it so if you're not quick, the pop-up with disappear.
• No keyboard shortcut to “mark all as read“.  This is a staple of any reader and I'm surprised it was left out.  As a side note to this, keyboard shortcuts have no user defined options, and there is no documentation of built in shortcuts other than it being listed next to the menu command.
• If “Mark item read after [x] seconds“ isn't selected in the Options dialog, the only way to mark an item as read is via the space bar...selecting another item via mouse leaves items marked as unread, as does arrow key navigation.

Here is a (non-laundry) list of feature requests:

• On the web tab, a drop-down list of recently visited sites would be nice, as would autocomplete.  This is a simple fix, only need to scan some reg keys for this information.
• Tabbed browsing (when are companies finally going to get this!!!).  If this was added, I would use Omea for virtually all of my browsing needs, though the status bar would also need to be beefed up a bit to give the usual certificate/privacy stuff/etc feedback for the user.
• Built in blog posting tool?  Yeah, this is a longshot...but if this was added, pretty much everything I need on a daily basis would be in one tool.
• Contact info only allows name/email address information.  I track a lot of people's activity by their website info (this is mainly for feeds, not newsgroups).  That being said, being able to enter alias information into someone's contact info is nice.
• Indexing performance needs some serious work, as does delivering news items.  These are both fairly resource intensive, some sort of control would be nice.
• Synchronization of content across machines.  This seems to be a stumbling block for almost all applications of this type I've used, and one that needs to be addressed.  At the very minimum, we all use at least 2 machines, and keeping content synch'd up manually is a real pain.

Here is a (non-laundry) list of Omea pluses and benefits:

• Great contact tracking.  I can search on someone's contact info and see what newsgroups and feeds (and I'm assuming emails in the Pro version) this person has been active in.
• Excellent aggregation of content on the “All Resources“ tab.  This ties into my next point...
• Excellent flagging system/creation of views (ala Outlook 2003).  This allows disparate content to be tied together for easier aggregation and viewing, which ties into my next point...
• This is probably my favorite feature for aggregation:  Linking information together.  Definitely enable “Links Pane“ from the view menu...with a single click you can link information together.  The linked information is displayed in the Links Pane for easy viewing, and allows tracking different mediums that deal with similar topics.  You can also assign categories from the Links Pane as well.  Great features.
• Workspaces.  I haven't played around with this too much yet, but I could see it being useful for multiple users, or if you need to break up categories of information (i.e. have a development workspace, a gaming workspace, an adminstration workspace, a news workspace...etc).  I have so much content I subscribe to that breaking it into seperate workspaces will be quite time consuming, but something that I will tackle soon.  This is the killer feature of Omea in my opinion.
• Omea supports CommentRSS for feeds, and individual posts can be viewed in a threaded view, identical to most newsgroup readers.  Great feature as no new browser window is needed to view comments.
• Support for all versions of RSS/Atom, and automatic syndication discovery of websites when adding a feed.

And finally, some tips I've come across to increase performance:

• Turn off automatic news checking if you subscribe to a large amount of NNTP feeds.  This will do nothing but choke performance, and individual feeds are automatically updated when you view them.
• Newpaper view for feeds on the Feeds tab is painfully slow if there are more than a trivial number of feeds in the feed group.  I prefer the Outlook style of reading anyways.
• Set “Download Bookmarked Pages“ to “When Viewing...“, again there is no reason to waste resources on something this expensive, especially if you have thousands of bookmarks.

Overall, I'm thoroughly impressed, and will be looking into the Pro version when it's out of beta (mainly for the email integration).  In the meantime, if you want to make Omea a better product, keep your eye on the newsgroups; Dimitry (the Omea PM) has been doing a great job of answering questions.  More information as it presents itself.  Cheers.

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