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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."

8 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. uber elite hackers by nocomment · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Those guys at omni are uber elite hackers. Been programming OSX since it was NeXT. They're the ones who ported Quake II to Mac in a week! Impressive group of coders right there. Omniweb is an excellent browser as well. If I'm not mistaken it's the old browser from the NeXT systems.

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    1. Re:uber elite hackers by Ponty · · Score: 2, Interesting

      OmniWeb 2.0 and 3.0 are still popular NEXTSTEP and OpenStep browsers. I use 3.0 regularly on my Cube and Nitro.

      OmniWeb and Mail.app were two of the reasons I moved to a Mac in 2001 from using my NeXT full-time. I proudly bought OW a second time. Now, though, I have to admit, that I'm using Safari full time. It's the only browser I've seen that produces results that are as attractively presented as OmniWeb. When I was forced to use IE or a gecko-based browser instead of OW (usually for JavaScript reasons), I would blanch. They're almost unusably ugly after you become accustomed to the elegance and attractiveness of OW.

  2. market share by zarqman · · Score: 2, Interesting
    "Case believes that Safari does not pose a threat to the OmniWeb market-share."

    perhaps that's because they'd have to have some market share to lose some?

    seriously, i tried omniweb on recommendation. however, i found it seriously lacking. while it must have strengths (or it wouldn't garner a recommendation from anyone), it doesn't have tabs, nor does it render css. with those two shortfalls, especially the latter, it's pretty much unusable in my eyes.

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    1. Re:market share by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      I don't actually think you have to use the word "hopefully" here. Just a day or two after Safari and WebCore were released, Case announced that OmniGroup would be using the WebCore foundation for the next major release of OmniWeb. Whether he's talking about WebKit or some kind of home-grown wrapper around WebCore is unclear, but the gist of it is that OmniGroup won't have to screw around with HTML rendering or JavaScript execution any more.

      Case made the point really well in the very first interview question. He said that Safari is for people who use the default browser that comes with the OS, and that Apple is rightly trying to make that default browser as great as they can. OmniWeb, though, is aimed at people who aren't happy with the default browser. Two totally different points of focus.

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    2. Re:market share by jcr · · Score: 2, Interesting

      For my part, I expect to make OW my default browser again as soon as they've adopted the KHTML engine.

      There are certain ways that Omni differentiates their product that I don't think Apple would ever do. (I just love the list of regex's in their privacy options, and the "take the cookie and discard it when I quit the app" ability.)

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  3. Re:iCab rocks by Visigothe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The problem is that is *isn't* fully functional. If it were, it would render CSS 1 and 2 correctly. As it stands, iCab does a pretty poor job of CSS. The features of the browser are pretty cool though.

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  4. Cookies, Toolbar, and it was just so damn pretty!! by KrazyFool · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As everyone else pointed out so well was cookie control.

    The toolbar, over looked by most, was a another huge factor for me wanted be able to have every pixel i can get for a web page. I loved how the link was in the toolbar too. Also on the toolbar, why was apple the first one to put the reload and stop button in one? I'm I the only person in the world that thinks that was just genius?!?! anywho...

    Back in the days of 3 browsers (ie, mozilla, omniweb) Omniweb won me over based on loading fast and looking so damn good but now the heat is on with Chimera, Phoenix (why? i don't know), Safari but I think if Onmiweb can take what made it and other browsers great I would gladly jump right back, and keep chimera on the side, we all know why ;)

  5. OmniWeb feature: Live editing of HTML by hiendohar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One feature that Omniweb seems to have to itself is the ability to edit the HTML source of pages that you view and then redisplay the pages as edited -- without leaving the browser or the page. This is useful for getting rid of background images or color schemes that make some pages unreadable. It's also good for testing CGI forms, since you can quickly manipulate hidden inputs, etc.