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Interview with Ken Case, CEO At Omni Group

Posted by Hemos on from the talking-head-report dept.

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."

5 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. OmniWeb .. cookies. .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    OmniWeb sucks.

    No tabbed browsing, very poor standards support (CSS, JavaScript).

    One thing about it absolutely rocks though: cookie handling.

    In OmniWeb you can specify if cookies are rejected, kept until end of session, kept indefinitely, or if omniweb should pop up a dialog asking what to do on each cookie.

    You set one of these as the default, and you can set any one of these options on individual domeains.

    Very simple. This allows me to set cookie handling normally on slashdot.org, paypal.com, etc., for auto-login; reject cookies from online ad sites; and accept cookies until end of session on all other sites.

    This gives me nice fine-grained control over cookies. How come no other browser does this? With most browsers it's all or none.

    Add in an option to reject cookies from sites other than the one in the location bar (to stop ads and third-party images from tracking me), and you'd have the perfect cookie control.

    I hope this kind of cookie control shows up in Safari.

    1. Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. by GMontag451 · · Score: 3, Insightful
      No tabbed browsing

      Tabbed browsing is a horrible idea anyway. It harkens to the Windows UI idea of having document windows within the program window. Each window is supposed to be a single document. Each page open in a separate window is a much better UI paradigm.

      The one thing I missed when I switched from iCab to OmniWeb was the fine-grained control over picture loading, although I believe they took that out of iCab in the more recent versions. You could block based on image pixel size, if the image server or path matched a wildcard expression (e.g. block all images that come from ads.* servers, or that have /ads/ in their path), or whether or not the image came from the same server as the page did.

    2. Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. by moof1138 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You may not like tabbed browsing, and if not, all is well for you as you have more browsers to pick from, but tabbed browser windows are far from a horrible idea. In fact I think it is one of the few really great UI ideas I have seen in the browser world in a long time.

      Just because Windows started the MDI thing long ago does not make tabbed browsing awful. The fact is that Windows simply had a really horrible implemetation of MDI. Windows inside of windows - eeew. Tabs are intutive, easy to use, and most implementations are well though out. They improve performance, and help to organize content that otherwise can get out of control. I used to hate having tons of browser windows open, and having to cascade them just so, so that I could go back and forth between the slew of pages I need to have open at work - now I use Chimera and am much happier.

      I realize that folks have various issues with them, some contrived, some genuine, but they do solve a usability problem I have suffered under for years better than any other solution I have seen yet. If you do not like them, great for you, you need not use them. For me, I can't live without them, and I will never use a browser that does not support tabs unless something better comes along that solves the same problem as elegantly.

      --

      Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
    3. Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Quick, identify which of the following tabs is for slashdot.org, which is for apple.com, and which is for sourceforge.net. To make this realistic, I have shortened the names to the length that you would normally see them in a browser such as Chimera.

      1) ...
      2) ...
      3) ...
      4) ...
      5) ...
      6) ...
      7) ...
      [and so on, all the way to]
      20) ...

      Ironically enough, where tabbed browsing would be most useful is where it becomes least practical to use.

  2. Must we continually bash a respected developer? by Amiasian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I am saddened by the total immaturity of people towards this Developer. The Omnigroup is probably one of the more innovative and clever of the OS X app writers. For all the nil points people point out about Omniweb, I can point out good ones. Of course, you get the ad filtering and pop up blocking. You get Shortcuts, which I'm surprised no one has mentioned. Want to search for an image on Google? Just define it in shortcuts as image@ ... and then the google search string. Now all you do is "image [query]" and boom, it's there. Speech recognition if you need it. Link extraction. The info panel for downloading individual page elements as well as being able to stop laggish elements from loading. A nice HTML editor which I was surprised by to see in a browser.
    Also, using the floating text input panel to write up this comment is "not too shabby". Alt dragging links is useful in some instances. Remembering window size, et al. I could go on and on. The thing is, for what I visit, Omniweb renders the sites excellently, at an acceptable speed and it filters out the garbage. What's to trash on this thing? And it's not as if the developer's going out and saying, "Ha ha ha! Look, fools, our browser doesn't support CSS ... love us." Nah, they admit it, and are working on solving their problems.
    Also, I think part of NeXT's problem was they alienated developers. Not good. And it's happening again.