Gen-9 Noah Review

I downloaded a copy of Gen-9's email/Internet product called Noah a couple of days ago to check out and this review is the result of me having used it since then.

Gen-9 set out to design Noah with the idea that they could help folks get more productive use out of their Internet usage. Were they successful? Let's see.

It's a fairly large install at 21 megs, only took a couple of minutes with my cable connection but if you are on dial-up you might want to think about finding yourself a wireless connection in  library or local coffee shop before you download it.

The install program runs pretty painlessly and quick. I installed it on my personal machine running Windows Vista Ultimate. After the install you are immediately given the option to run Noah. Upon launching Noah I was presented with a setup wizard similar to the one in the screenshot below.

This shows the first screen of the wizard. Be very careful and review all of the options on each page, as the only buttons on it once you start are 'next' and either 'close' or 'cancel' (I can't remember which). There is no 'back' button to change your settings, which I didn't find out until I had gone a couple of screens in and wanted to go back and check something I had selected. I was afraid that it wouldn't run the setup wizard again, so I just continued on figuring that if I needed to change anything I would be able to from the main interface. I was correct with that assumption.

Once you've run through the wizard the screen below comes up...

I chose not to run through the tutorial at the time, wanting to poke around the program a bit. The tutorial is also available from Gen-9's wed site at any time and since Noah looked pretty intuitive and easy to use I wanted to check it out straight 'out of the box'. Loading time for the program is pretty quick. When you first open Noah the logo shows and it loads the database information, then the program itself.

As you can see from my taskbar I always have several programs running. Actually at the time I took each screenshot for this I was only running about half of the norm. Programs for email and RSS feeds and programs for web browsing. Noah aims to combine those programs and does a pretty good job of it. It lets you import your accounts and settings from Outlook as well as Thunderbird with automatic setup for Gmail, Lycos, Yahoo, Netscape, Mail.com and Tiscali. There unfortunately is no import option for Hotmail (Windows Live Mail) or AOL.

In addition to email accounts, Noah also lets you import your contacts as well. There are some other neat features that I have been finding as I use it, such as extremely quick access to all of your documents there on the left hand side of the program.

I like the web browser implementation as well. You can use the hand screen controls to maximize or completely close the web browser to get back into the email or contacts portion of the program.

The strength of the program is really in the email interface rather than the browser though. It's got a simple drag-drop interface and makes it very easy to set up thousands of emails in different channels/folders so that accessing them is much easier than most email clients and much less painful to find important stuff that you need.

You can get to the primary download site at the Gen-9 home page if you are interested in checking it out.