OmniWeb 5
I was hoping to be watching Steve Jobs’ keynote from Macworld San Francisco around now, but I’m getting an ‘insufficient bandwidth’ error message on the stream. Grrr. So I’ll talk about OmniWeb 5 instead.
I’m a big fan of OmniWeb applications. Thanks to their rather generous academic pricing, I’m the proud owner of OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle Pro. OmniGraffleâin particularâis beautifully designed, with a lot of very innovative touches. I even use it as a simple page layout program, and to produce the posters and catalogues for Mr. Bsag’s art exhibitions. However, I didn’t fall for OmniWeb in the same way.
Before they started using Safari’s webcore, my main problem with it was that it was really poor at displaying sites using modern CSS design. Some sites looked wonderful, but this blogâfor exampleâdisplayed as a single ultra-thin column, with the main text and sidebar drawing on top of one another. This was hardly ideal. The latest version using WebCore has solved these problems, and it renders as well as Safari. There are also some nice touches with zoomed expandable text fields for filling in forms, good history searching, notification when a bookmarked page is updated (useful for pages without RSS feeds) and so on, but now that I’m used to tabbed browsing, I just can’t get used to opening each page in a new window.
The upcoming OmniWeb 5 is going to include tabs, and they’ve implemented them in a rather unusual way. The tabs are in a drawer at the side, and are represented by thumbnails of the page, so that you can identify each page by its appearance. There has already been a fair amount of debate about whether this will be usable or not, but a sneaky peek at a video of it in action here1 suggests that it might be pretty nifty.
Even better, OmniWeb 5 offers something called ‘Workspaces’. These are sets of tabs or windowsâalong with their respective browsing historyâwhich can be saved as a snapshot and restored as a group. This strikes me as a fantastic idea. I often have multiple tabs open for different reasons. When I’m at work, I don’t really want or need the stuff I was browsing at home2, and vice versa, but it’s a chore to manually save those as bookmarks to return to them later.
I’m certainly going to give it a good try out when the beta is released on 2nd February.
1 The link was provided by John Hicks in the comments of this post.
2 No, not for the reasons you might be thinking…
1
I'm watching the keynote as we speak (thanks for the pointer) but thus far it hasn't been all that exciting: iDVD, iMovie, integration with .mac web space (etc, etc). So, other than the sheer spectacle of it all, you probably haven't missed a great deal.----- ooh, spoke too soon. GarageBand (the new/5th iLife app) looks really interesting - software synth, 64 track digital recording, 1000+ loops, a whole shed-load of high quality instruments, and lots and lots of other goodies. I suspect that I desperately need a copy (and a usb/midi keyboard)
by djn1 @ 06/01/2004 8:01 pm • Permalink •
2
I use Omniweb occasionally. It does display those web pages with a significant amount of text in small point size more attractively and more legibly than Safari, but I find that as well as lacking tabs, it is also irritatingly slow, so I usually prefer Safari.
by ThoughtBadger @ 07/01/2004 12:02 am • Permalink •
3
I think you (and the movies) just convinced me to buy Omniweb 5 as soon as its out.
by Markus @ 07/01/2004 7:01 am • Permalink •
4
djn1: GarageBand looks pretty good, but it's not something that I would ever use myself, having about a milligramme of musical talent myself (I can appreciate music, but not generate it).
ThoughtBadger: Yeah, it does seem a bit slow. Let's see if the update improves that at all.
Markus: I'm intrigued too - should be interesting.
by bsag @ 07/01/2004 9:01 pm • Permalink •
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