I said I’d write up my thoughts on spending one week with OmniWeb 5. Before starting, here’s the Coles Notes version: I bought the upgrade license, and have switched to using OmniWeb 5 (almost) 100% (see below for reasons why it’s not at a full 100% yet). Here goes:
Things I love about OmniWeb 5
The tab implementation freaking ROCKS. - almost exactly what I mocked up in January 2003, with the added bonus of page thumbnails… And the thumbnails are absolutely amazing and gorgeous. Can glance at 10 thumbnails and see exactly where I need to go next… And, it shows the status of pages loading in the background (shows a green checkmark on pages when they’ve finished loading)
Saving the workspace as you work - so if you quit, or the browser crashes, all tabs are restored right where you left off the next time you launch (even remembering scroll position).
Textarea form elements on web pages have this cool widget where you can get a larger sheet for more effective text entry - with an “Import from File” button. Awesome if you fill out a lot of forms (like, say while developing a web app…)
Site Preferences - override application prefs on a per-site basis
View: View in Source Editor! You can edit the HTML for a page in a source editor, and REDISPLAY THE EDITS LIVE, without having access to the page’s server. Awesome for debugging stuff.
Ad blocking is awesome. And it’s highly customizable, too. Be gone, annoying flashing banner ads! Related to this is the ability to control animation of GIFs on a page - I’ve got mine set to allow animation for no more than 20 seconds.
URL Shortcuts. You can add shortcuts for any URL, and as an added bonus, you can add parameters for pages that accept them (like search engines, etc…). Slashdot is just “slash” now. No waiting for autocomplete… I worked up a shortcut that allows me to search CAREO from the navigation bar (like Alan’s shiny new MLX Firefox plugin)
Regular expressions in the Find utility. Holy crap! Not that I’m a RegEx expert or anything, but any app that cares enough to put that kind of functionality at my fingertips deserves some serious kudos.
The “Page Info” panel. Every bit of detail of every single part of a page is available in a report. Files grouped by type (images, style sheets, scripts, frames, etc…) with full stats (file size, last modified date, expiry date of cache…). And, the ability to display each individual item, or save it separately, or view the source for it. Wow. Awesome for debugging websites…
Things I’m Ambivalent About
RSS implementation. Thought I’d love it. Thought it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. But it’s just nowhere near NetNewsWire, only showing titles of items in a feed, and not tracking read/unread state.
Bookmarks. Maybe I just haven’t given it enough time, but it doesn’t seem dramatically better than Safari’s bookmark implementation (and has a wrinkle that you can’t drag a page’s URL proxy from the address bar into the in-browser-window bookmarks display - you get the bookmarks:/ URL instead. There’s a workaround, but that’s not the point…
Shared Bookmarks - not really useful unless everyone on your LAN is using OmniWeb 5 - I’m the only one I’m aware of here…
Multiple Workspaces - thought I’d really use these, but opening bookmark folders in tabs within the current default workspace works better for me.
Bookmarks syncing - I’ve been a huge fan of this with Safari, so it’s not groundbreaking, but it’s great to know it’s there.
Things I’m Not a Great Fan Of
Out of date WebCore. Doesn’t work with GMail (that’s the one thing I keep Safari running on a second machine for…)
The “Save Window Size” command works great for single-display systems, but if I have a window on my secondary display while at work (on an external monitor plugged into my TiBook), and set the window to prefer that screen by “Saving Window Size” on it, then when I go home (without the external monitor), the window tries to open on the external monitor anyway. I can grab the edge of the title bar and drag it back on to the only screen, but it’s a huge pain. It would be cool if the app was smart enough to realize the number of screens, and relative position thereof while saving size…
The Navigation Bar. Separate Stop and Reload buttons are redundant - and waste space on the nav bar. I can only do one or the other, never both… Also, I really miss Safari’s progress-bar-under-location-field display. It’s just so handy to be able to know that a page is about half loading by seeing a blue bar in my peripheral vision - without having to look up from what I’m reading, and without having to open an Activity Viewer. It’s nice to have the Activity Viewer, but it shouldn’t be the primary way to display page status.
No way to export my bookmarks. It will import them fine. Great. Now what? It will read my Safari bookmarks (but not write to them). I’ve been using Safari Bookmark Exporter to export my Safari bookmarks to every browser on my system. Can’t do that anymore, since bookmarks will be going into my OmniWeb bookmarks file, which is in a different format…
Anyway, I’m sure it’s far from a complete list, in each of the 3 categories. Bottom line is, I love OmniWeb 5, and plan to be a long time user.
I’m not too aware of the American political landscape, but are Democrats just that much geekier than Republicans? There’s yet another reason to give Kerry the vote (you know, aside from the whole rigged-2000-election thing and the lying-to-go-to-war thing…) ;-)
The DirectorWeb website is 10 years old! Holy cow. Time flies. I used to spend a LOT of time on this site, using their Direct-L listserv archive/search utility, back when I was doing ~100% Director stuff. Alan did an awesome job on DirectorWeb, so much so that I considered it essential to doing Director development. I still remember many of the regulars (WTHMO - Warren (the Howdy Man Oleshko), Zav, Zac, John Dowdell, Warren The Audi Man (from Integration.qc.ca, IIRC) and many more…) Direct-L searches for “howdy” show that WTHMO must still be active ;-) I appear to have been dropped from the online archives, or perhaps more accurately, the archive doesn’t go back far enough to include me ;-)
It’s only been a day, but I’m really liking OmniWeb 5. I had one crash, but other than that it’s been flawless.
The extra features are great (edit HTML then refresh the browser window - on any website!). Love the thumbnail tab view. Love the speed and ad-blocking. Hate the lack of Safari’s cool progress bar. Hate the separate Reload and Stop buttons. Hate that GMail doesn’t work in it… I did pay my upgrade fee for OW5 already, though ;-)
I finally got a version of the JavaEOXMLSupport.framework working to the level that it could actually be used in a project. The previous version was usable for read-only cases, but was pretty useless for editing/writing XML.
I had to rethink the strategy a bit. The previous strategy treated every Element in a document as an individual EO. That works conceptually, because it’s easy to model (you can model the XML schema in EOModeler, and use that, in theory - King even wrote a tool to generate an EOModel from a schema!) It’s harder to implement this, however, because individual EOs are somewhat separated from the DOM - they don’t know where they are within the DOM, etc… Also, in this model, it was very hard to add new elements to an existing document. Say a document didn’t have a keyword when it was pulled from the database. This strategy makes it difficult to add a classification.keyword.string if there isn’t one already… (how do you add an element into a DOM tree when you don’t know where you are in that tree?)
Prior to Safari, I was a die-hard OmniWeb 4 (then 4.5) user. I really liked OmniWeb, but Safari was much better (IMHO) at things like bookmark management.
I’ve been following OmniWeb’s development, and really like some of the new stuff (using WebKit means pages render correctly, the new tab implementation looks pretty sweet, workspaces should be useful, RSS feeds(?) …).
So, I’m going to try using OmniWeb 5 for a week, and see how it works in the field. I’ve switched my default browser to it so apps like NetNewsWire open it automatically. (btw, the tab thumbnails are awesome for opening stuff from NNW!). I’ll post again in a week with some thoughts…
I’m clearing my whiteboard, and need the space this was occupying, so I’m dumping it here for future reference. The following table compares the time it takes to retrieve XML from various sources (XML databases and the like) as well as to perform various types of processing (nothing, save as file, convert to DOM…). This table was very useful when we were coming up with our current XML storage strategy.
Tonight, I got the XStreamDB EOAdaptor firing on almost all cylinders. It has been able to query and retrieve XML documents for quite some time now, but it can now also update (replace existing documents with edited versions) and insert new documents. It’s not extremely tested yet, so there may be some pitfalls or errors (likely an error or two, or more likely some overgeneralized assumption or the like).
It’s got a hard-coded reference to the database and root at the moment, but that won’t take long to switch to code that pulls that from the EOModel for the Entity in question. Also, there isn’t a way to delete documents via the adaptor - but for now I’m more than fine with hitting XStreamDB Explorer to do that manually…
The International Conference on Knowledge Sharing and Collaborative Engineering (KSCE 2004) will highlight advances in the research and present day applications of knowledge sharing and collaborative engineering, and will also attempt to forecast future trends and developments. Presentations of recent technical developments and demonstrations of current product applications will allow for the exchange of ideas amongst international researchers and practitioners. Highlights of the week will include paper sessions, tutorials, and keynote addresses.
I listened to the IT Conversations interview with Tim O’Reilly on the way in this morning. Very interesting interview. I love the vision that Tim has for his company - it’s more about capturing knowledge (whatever that means) rather than growing their market. It’s kind of cool to see how taking the right attitude can actually lead to a strong position in the market (how many people buy O’Reilly books vs. the others? I’d bet a LOT).
Just logged into my GMail account, and it looks like I’ve got 4 invitations that I can give away. let me know if you want one. I won’t make anyone jump through hoops or anything. Karma will be involved somehow…
UPDATE: They’re all gone… I’ll post if I get more invites (but I’m not maintaining a waiting list or anything…)
UPDATE:DO NOT EMAIL ME FOR INVITES IF YOU FOUND THIS PAGE ON GOOGLE! I already regret putting the offer in an entry here. Any future invites I get will be dealt with off-blog, unless the freeloading leeches let up. Why do they have to wreck everything online?
Just ran another quick stats check on my email accounts using ComStats, and the number of non-spam emails I receive (which survive my spam filters, and which don’t get immediately deleted) per day is still growing.
I don’t even want to think about what the stats would look like if I actually saw the spam that is sent to me…
I’m getting about double the number of daily non-spam messages that I was getting last spring, but I think I’m getting my most valuable information from my RSS reader…
