Interview with Ken Case, CEO At Omni Group

Gentu writes "Omni Group, makers of OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and other OSX products, talked to OSNews via its CEO, Ken Case. The interview talks about the company and its products, Apple's strategies, Safari, NeXT and the future. Case believes that Safari does not pose a threat to the OmniWeb market-share."

Comments

Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. ..

[Alan Partridge]

Omniweb DOES NOT suck. You mentioned the excellent cookie handling (agreed), but forget the incredible page rendering quality, awesome bookmarking system (providing constant feedback on redirected, updated and broken links), excellent window handling (fuck tabs - give me open behind and save window size ANY day), superb form filling (excellent rendering with aspell supported properly and now, zoomed text boxes too).

Omniweb loses out on IE and CSS support, I agree - but MY online banking still prefers it to any other browser, and Safari's timeouts really do BORE me now.

Re:market share

[Daleks]

nor does it render css

Yes it does. Your CSS rules just have to end with a semicolon, like this:

.foo {
margin: 10px;
background-color: yellow;
}

The semicolon is optional, so says W3C, but the OW CSS parser is just malformed in that respect. OW is a very nice browser, but it's renderer and standards support need a lot of work, as Ken Case admits several times in the article. Hopefully they will use WebKit in OW5 and get all of that work done for free by Apple and concentrate on making a great interface.

iCab cookie management

[singularity]

I take exception to the idea that no other web browser does the cookie management similar to OmniWeb. iCab, also available for Mac OS X does exactly this.

Re:uber elite hackers

[cbv]

If I'm not mistaken it's the old browser from the NeXT systems.

The oldest was called Nexus, also simply known as WorldWideWeb.app by Tim Berners-Lee. But OmniWeb is probably the oldest that survived.

Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. ..

[Anonymous Coward]

You can do all this in OmniWeb. Preferences>Privacy>Voila! Ad control system.

Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. ..

[Alan Partridge]

"Uh, what? Yeah "opening behind" is okay but Safari does that and no matter what, it's not tabbed browsing."

If you need tabbed browsing, you're using the wrong window manager. Mac OSX may not be as good as OS9, but it's a damn site better than anything else (Living products, that is).

I didn't even bother going into Omniweb's other great features like it's excellent page junk filtration, voice control (try it! it actually makes sense), excellent source editor (lovely tag highlighting - where's that in Safari?). Face it - Omniweb is a true 'power' browser - albeit one that's undermined by it's laggardly standards support. It's certainly a better long term productivity aid than anything else I've used.

Re:Quake *2* in a week?

[TotallyUseless]

Actually, Quake 2 was ported by Logicware (many of the Logicware employees went on to form Contraband Entertainment) for commercial release. The fine Fruits of the Dojo version of Quake 2 is based off of the GPL code for q2 which was released a bit later.

You are right however about Quake 3. And OmniGroup did get it basically up and running within a week or two. They can code OS X apps pretty much as well as any Apple employed developer I would imagine. They deserve a lot of credit for setting the example for good OS X apps.