Xobni – useful but may have to go

I've been using Xobni for a couple of weeks now since their launch at the TechCrunch conference. It has a couple of features I really like – for example, displaying the last email you looked at when switching Outlook from Mail to Calendar. As simple as it sounds, this is a great feature as it saves having to remember the date and time of the meeting you are about to add to the calendar or having two windows open for Outlook – one for mail and the other for the calendar.

Unfortunately, since installing Xobni the performance of Outlook has fallen dramatically and from time to time Outlook hangs consuming 50% or more of the CPU. After a few of the hangs I'm beginning to believe there is an interaction between Xobni and X1 – X1 is the fast-as-you-can-type search tool that makes search for everything (mail, contacts, files…) so fast that it's a corner stone of my workflow.

I'm going to wait for another release update of Xobni before deciding whether it stays or not – I hope the interaction problem gets nailed but in the limit, Xobni is a nice to have and X1 is a MUST have for me.

Comments

[Stu Phillips]

Currently running v1.0.3 (build 1942) and much better. I've seen a couple of times where Outlook hangs - clicking on the close button brings up the "Outlook isn't responding" dialog from Microsoft Office...

Big improvement though over the earlier release.

Stu

[Eric]

Great post. Xobni is indeed a really cool tool. They have made MAJOR strides in performance - you should ask them for their newest build. It appears (to me) to be 5x-10x faster and no longer slows down Outlook at all. I've been running it for almost 2 weeks and it is really wonderful stuff. Hope this helps!

[Stu Phillips]

Xobni is certainly on the tech support ball - I had an update from Xobni even before this blog post and its now installed, chewing through my (voluminous!) email archives.

Watch this space for an update.

Stu

[Skyler Thomas]

Glad to see this review! Thank you. Just wanted to send out reassuring words that Xobni's product team has been and is continuing to bang out performance issues and is sending out automatic updates regularly. We hope this will allow users to continue to enjoy Xobni! We've come a long way since TechCrunch. Thanks!
Skyler Thomas
Xobni Support Team