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CharlesS · Apr 9, 2003, 05:03 PM

Originally posted by Rickster:
It's to limit the tester pool so that everyone and their god isn't sending us email

I dunno, if it were me, I think it'd be kind of cool to have Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, and Buddha doing my beta testing...

justinmilo · Apr 9, 2003, 05:04 PM

Wait, so did you guys reverse engineer webcore? I thought Apple had yet to release a usable framework for webcore, kwq, etc. I remember people trying to use webcore in cocoa apps and not getting it work. You guys somehow managed it? When Apple releases a framework for webcore are you going to go with that, or continue with your own?

kovacs · Apr 9, 2003, 05:18 PM

Originally posted by m.brown:
Go to the Omnigroup store - request a trial licecnce - 1 day - and then go to:

this part of macromedia's website

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to the "Additional Questions

How did you learn about the pirated software"

See in the upper right hand corner of the text field there is a square with a plus in it - click it - woah mama!

I love that effect.

Wow amazing, I love it !!

solbo · Apr 9, 2003, 05:34 PM

Originally posted by justinmilo:
Wait, so did you guys reverse engineer webcore? I thought Apple had yet to release a usable framework for webcore, kwq, etc. I remember people trying to use webcore in cocoa apps and not getting it work. You guys somehow managed it? When Apple releases a framework for webcore are you going to go with that, or continue with your own?

WebCore is an open source framework why would they need to reverse engineer it?

It isn't built into the OS as an accessible Framework yet, but maybe it will be in Panther.

justinmilo · Apr 9, 2003, 05:52 PM

I meant the bridge of WebCore to Cocoa, which isn't open source. WebCore is open source, but from what I understood it doesn't display much by itself. I don't think Apple hasn't finished the SDK for it yet.

When WebCore was first released quite a few cocoa programers tried to build an application around it and ran into a ton of difficulties. I'm assuming that Omni figured out these issues and reverse engineered the bridge that takes the layout from khtml and makes it an actual view.

cpac · Apr 9, 2003, 05:54 PM

Originally posted by m.brown:
...See in the upper right hand corner of the text field there is a square with a plus in it - click it - woah mama!

I love that effect.

This is actually in 4.2 (and has been for a while). No need for a license/sneaky peak to try it out.

Tim2 at Omni · Apr 9, 2003, 06:00 PM

Originally posted by justinmilo:
Wait, so did you guys reverse engineer webcore? I thought Apple had yet to release a usable framework for webcore, kwq, etc. I remember people trying to use webcore in cocoa apps and not getting it work. You guys somehow managed it? When Apple releases a framework for webcore are you going to go with that, or continue with your own?

I wouldn't exactly say we reverse engineered it, but we did spend about a month (in fact, we still are) researching various ways of interacting with WebCore in a stable, efficient manner. The problem is that although KHTML has some fairly extensive documentation, there is little to no documentation for WebCore.

The plan right now is to continue to use our own layer over WebCore instead of using Apple's upcoming Safari SDK (WebKit, WebFoundation). Among other things, this allows us to make bug fixes and customizations at our own pace instead of waiting for Apple to do it for us.

TheIceMan · Apr 9, 2003, 06:00 PM

Rickster:
Just wanna say good luck with your work. I'm looking forward to testing out the fully-functional OW 4.5 and OW 5.0, hopefully by then you'll implement TABS and BETTER pop-up blocking. Because right now, pop-up blocking is horrible compared to Camino & Safari.

cpac · Apr 9, 2003, 06:21 PM

Originally posted by TheIceMan:
Because right now, pop-up blocking is horrible compared to Camino & Safari.

Does nobody ever read release notes? 4.2's pop-up blocking is fine, if not more sophisticated that Safari's & Camino's. The release notes for 4.5sp1 explicitely state that pop-up blocking is not yet working (nor all all the ad blocking things, or auto-fill, or various other options).

ratlater · Apr 9, 2003, 06:22 PM

Originally posted by TheIceMan:
Rickster:
Just wanna say good luck with your work. I'm looking forward to testing out the fully-functional OW 4.5 and OW 5.0, hopefully by then you'll implement TABS and BETTER pop-up blocking. Because right now, pop-up blocking is horrible compared to Camino & Safari.

All privacy feautres are disabled in SP1, look at the release notes. This includes pop-up blocking.

-matt

MrBS · Apr 9, 2003, 06:24 PM

Originally posted by Tim2 at Omni:
The plan right now is to continue to use our own layer over WebCore instead of using Apple's upcoming Safari SDK (WebKit, WebFoundation). Among other things, this allows us to make bug fixes and customizations at our own pace instead of waiting for Apple to do it for us.

T2: does Omni's layer allow things like multi-threading and source editing? Or will it?

Nice decision with the liscened sp.

~BS

Tim2 at Omni · Apr 9, 2003, 06:35 PM

Originally posted by MrBS:
T2: does Omni's layer allow things like multi-threading and source editing? Or will it?
~BS

Unfortunately, WebCore/KHTML is designed to be run in a single thread. So while we retain our multithreaded networking stuff, we have to do layout and rendering in the main thread. We're going to explore some options and see if we can do anything about that.

Our source editor does work in 4.5, though there are some bugs with reformatting.

Rickster · Apr 9, 2003, 06:43 PM

Originally posted by CharlesS:
I dunno, if it were me, I think it'd be kind of cool to have Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, and Buddha doing my beta testing...

Oops... I meant to type the common phrase "everyone and their dog", though "everyone and their god" would certainly be interesting.

Hope I haven't offended anyone.

When WebCore was first released quite a few cocoa programers tried to build an application around it and ran into a ton of difficulties. I'm assuming that Omni figured out these issues and reverse engineered the bridge that takes the layout from khtml and makes it an actual view.

Part of the problem was that the first attempts people made to use WebCore sort of assumed it was a complete "web engine". It's not -- it expects to be plugged into something greater which provides text layout, image rendering, integration into the NSView hierarchy, etc, and as Tim2 notes, the procotols for doing this weren't documented. But again, it's hard to call the process of figuring out how to use that "reverse engineering" since WebCore is open source.

To further elaborate on Tim2's comments: Apple's forthcoming Safari SDK (WebKit/WebFoundation) is expected to be closed-source. This will be fine for everybody who wants to embed an HTML viewer as a "black box" within their app... but we're making a full-featured web browser. In order to distinguish ourselves from the competition we need the freedom to enhance functionality and add innovative features in any part of the software, and we can't do that with a "black box". Features like the cookie filtering and zoomed form editor we've brought forward from 4.2 to 4.5 would be much more difficult without being able to modify the "engine" parts.

All privacy feautres are disabled in SP1, look at the release notes.

Not so much "disabled" as "unimplemented".

does Omni's layer allow things like multi-threading and source editing?

You'll notice the source editor with "live" redisplaying works just great in 4.5sp1.

We're still using OWF and OmniNetworking "below" WebCore, so we still get the benefits of our multithreaded pipeline architecture. Unfortunately, WebCore and JavaScriptCore aren't at all thread-safe, so the efficiency boost from threaded networking is offset by having all the layout and script evaluation clobbering the main thread. We've got an idea or two for dealing with that, though.

flysky · Apr 9, 2003, 07:46 PM

Thanks to Rick and Tim for clearing that up about threading and earlier about text rendering, since the latter in particular is somethat that OW has always seemed to do better than other browsers. I guess, for now, at least in those regards, using WC and JCS is a good news/bad news proposition. Glad to hear you have some ideas about improving in both areas.

I'm also wondering, though, what, if anything, the move to WC and JCS means for multi-processor support.

I'm looking forward to getting home and trying out 4.5sp1.

Rickster · Apr 9, 2003, 09:24 PM

As mentioned in T2's and my last posts, we're still multithreaded. So we still benefit from multiple processors. The problem is that we aren't able to use multiple threads in as many places as in our old engine, so the performance boost from multiple processors is less than in 4.2. Also, a lot of work has to be done in the main thread, which means AppKit gets less time to process events, which makes the app less responsive while it's working. But it's still prety early in the 4.5 development cycle, and this may change.

BTW, sneaky peek 2 is coming soon.

TheIceMan · Apr 9, 2003, 09:42 PM

cpac & rickster:
I should clarify that I WAS referring to OmniWeb 4.2. The pop-up blocking is still bad compared to Camino and Safari. Test them out at www.mail.com and see for yourself.

MrBS · Apr 9, 2003, 09:59 PM

Originally posted by TheIceMan:
cpac & rickster:
I should clarify that I WAS referring to OmniWeb 4.2. The pop-up blocking is still bad compared to Camino and Safari. Test them out at www.mail.com and see for yourself.

I've found OW 4.2's privacy features to be far superior. I clicked around for a bit on mail.com and had no pop-ups. You do realize you need to set it to block pop ups right?

~BS

TheIceMan · Apr 9, 2003, 11:28 PM

Originally posted by MrBS:
I've found OW 4.2's privacy features to be far superior. I clicked around for a bit on mail.com and had no pop-ups. You do realize you need to set it to block pop ups right?

~BS

Yes, that is a given. I guess your experiences were different.

tikki · Apr 10, 2003, 01:01 AM

sp2 is out

juanvaldes · Apr 10, 2003, 01:13 AM

Omniweb -> IE -> Omniweb -> Chimera -> Safari -> Camino...now Omniweb again?!?

I curse you guys for making such a great browser...AGAIN!

Keep up the great work guys, can't wait to make Omniweb my default browser again.

TheIceMan · Apr 10, 2003, 01:56 AM

Rickster or ratlater
I must commend OmniWeb on how beautifully it renders text though. Why is it that text looks so nice in OW and NOT in Camino or Safari? I can't explain it except to say that staring at the text in OmniWeb is so much more pleasant than in Safari or Camino.

ablaze · Apr 10, 2003, 03:36 AM

@Rickster:
Now that you will be using Webcore, does that mean, that you too will help improving it? Or do you let Apple and the KDE guys do all the bug fixing for the rendering engine? I think the more people help out with it, the faster we will get the best rendering engine out there. But please don't fork your own version of Webcore!
Another question: When Webcore will eventually be implemented system wide, will OW directly be able to use an updated Webcore version, or do you intend to ship your own Webcore bundle with each release?

Jan Van Boghout · Apr 10, 2003, 07:01 AM

Originally posted by TheIceMan:
Rickster or ratlater
I must commend OmniWeb on how beautifully it renders text though. Why is it that text looks so nice in OW and NOT in Camino or Safari? I can't explain it except to say that staring at the text in OmniWeb is so much more pleasant than in Safari or Camino.

I agree that fonts look far superior to Camino, but Safari and OmniWeb have exactly the same beatiful font rendering

JKT · Apr 10, 2003, 07:27 AM

Originally posted by ablaze:
@Rickster:
Now that you will be using Webcore, does that mean, that you too will help improving it? Or do you let Apple and the KDE guys do all the bug fixing for the rendering engine? I think the more people help out with it, the faster we will get the best rendering engine out there. But please don't fork your own version of Webcore!
Another question: When Webcore will eventually be implemented system wide, will OW directly be able to use an updated Webcore version, or do you intend to ship your own Webcore bundle with each release?

I think Rickster has already said that any bug fixes are submitted back (they have to be, otherwise Omni would be in breach of the open source licence that enables them to use Webcore).

FWIW, for those of you just discovering the + button on forms (which was introduced with 4.2), you can actually change the font and font size used on the pop-up sheet that appears via the system Font panel (command-T) - a big boon to those with not-so-good eyesight.

P.S. Thanks to the omni folk for clarifying the font metrics bug I was experiencing.

m.brown · Apr 10, 2003, 07:31 AM

Originally posted by JKT:
I think Rickster has already said that any bug fixes are submitted back (they have to be, otherwise Omni would be in breach of the open source licence that enables them to use Webcore).

FWIW, for those of you just discovering the + button on forms (which was introduced with 4.2), you can actually change the font and font size used on the pop-up sheet that appears via the system Font panel (command-T) - a big boon to those with not-so-good eyesight.

P.S. Thanks to the omni folk for clarifying the font metrics bug I was experiencing.

Who introduced that Omni group or Webcore?

Gul Banana · Apr 10, 2003, 08:22 AM

Omni Group. It's not in Safari.

m.brown · Apr 10, 2003, 08:39 AM

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
Omni Group. It's not in Safari.

It is a very cool feature.

BZ · Apr 10, 2003, 09:42 AM

Originally posted by m.brown:
It is a very cool feature.

This would be one of the reasons why I paid for OmniWeb.

Here are some others (off the top of my head now that I sit in front of an NT workstation).

Bookmarks
- Self updating
- Self fixing (can redo its own pointer, if redirected on outdated bookmark)
- Object oriented (a folder with an update time on it will update all of the bookmarks in the folder)
- Filter on dead bookmarks
- Shows updated bookmarks in dock
- Dock icon is clickable to updated bookmarks
- Go to next new bookmark
- Can pick folder for new bookmarks to be added to

Customizable
- Toolbar (unline Safari) can be customized like any other cocoa app
- Can make it very small which is good for powerbooks with limited horizontal space

Download manager
- respects where to download to
- Shows progress
- Can stay in the background
- Generally cool

Other
- Spell checking (works, always, first)
- Very cool search on bookmark and history titles
- Best ad blocking around (size and string based */ads/*)
- Click link to open window behind
- Tons of contextual features like "Save all links" and "Save all images")

What I want to see in OW 5.0
- Some sort of tabbed thingy (make it better OG)
- Diplay favicons in toolbar and in bookmarks
- More goodies...

BZ

ratlater · Apr 10, 2003, 12:54 PM

Originally posted by ablaze:
@Rickster:
Now that you will be using Webcore, does that mean, that you too will help improving it? Or do you let Apple and the KDE guys do all the bug fixing for the rendering engine? I think the more people help out with it, the faster we will get the best rendering engine out there. But please don't fork your own version of Webcore!
Another question: When Webcore will eventually be implemented system wide, will OW directly be able to use an updated Webcore version, or do you intend to ship your own Webcore bundle with each release?

According to what I've read from the OG crew: 1) Yes they are submitting bug fixes and they are implementing new features to the rendering engine and submitting these back too. 2) When Apple releases Webcore system wide it will be called something like Webkit. OmniGroup won't use this, they'll continue to use Webcore. So the only way to get a new version of Webcore in OW is if OG releases it.

-matt

ratlater · Apr 10, 2003, 12:56 PM

Originally posted by tikki:
sp2 is out

And it's way faster. I had a lot of beachballs with sp1, none with sp2 so far and page load time is much lower.

-matt

JKT · Apr 10, 2003, 01:05 PM

Boy, it is positively weird seeing ads again

From the OmniWeb mailing list:

> Together with the text-selecting bug named in the release notes, I
> suppose that OmniWeb still does its own text handling, is that right?
> Or would I have to trash prefs and OW would do it right?

That's right. WebCore does not do text drawing, it only processes the
page and then tells us what we need to draw to the screen for text.
We're still working hard on the text rendering so expect things to
speed up a bit (including page resizing), and we'll hopefully get rid
of some of the more serious bugs in text rendering soon. One that
stands out in 4.5sp1 is that after browsing for some time the text on
some pages will be really horribly spaced. Letters will run into one
another or even mash together completely. Restarting OmniWeb and going
to the same page should fix the issue.

Thanks everyone!

Scott M
Support Engineer
The Omni Group

I take it that this wasn't fixed by sp2 as I am seeing even more horrible artefacts than before (that described and text spilling over table boundaries)?

CharlesS · Apr 10, 2003, 01:24 PM

Originally posted by BZ:
Download manager
- respects where to download to
- Shows progress
- Can stay in the background
- Generally cool

Have they fixed the bug yet where when you clicked on a download link, the download manager window would pop up, but not get key status, so that if you hit Command-W to close it, it would close the window behind it?

That always drove me nuts...

michael_l · Apr 10, 2003, 02:13 PM

so ... is there any way to export my safari bookmarks back to omniweb? (sigh ... omniweb->chimera->safari->omniweb ...)

BZ · Apr 10, 2003, 02:33 PM

Bookit looks good...

Originally posted by michael_l:
so ... is there any way to export my safari bookmarks back to omniweb? (sigh ... omniweb->chimera->safari->omniweb ...)

http://www.everydaysoftware.net/bookit/

Anomalous · Apr 10, 2003, 04:05 PM

Originally posted by lawgeek:
Sigh... I bet this is exactly the reason why companies are so hesitant to release public betas...

I am not referring to the public beta, I am referring to the overall concept. I do not have or want an OW license and I did not even try the beta. OmniWeb is not as good as than Safari and costs a lot more, and even if they work out all the bugs this will still be true.

"Sigh," welcome to my Ignore List.

ambush · 04:36 PM

Originally posted by Anomalous:
I am not referring to the public beta, I am referring to the overall concept. I do not have or want an OW license and I did not even try the beta. OmniWeb is not as good as than Safari and costs a lot more, and even if they work out all the bugs this will still be true.

"Sigh," welcome to my Ignore List.

First, they are SNEAKYPEEKS for chrissake! They're not Public. They're for registered OW users ONLY! God! It's not even alpha, it's not even beta, it's a DAILY BUILD from CVS (or something similar). This is exactly the problem with sneakypeeks or prebetas - people always take it as a finished products and whine and compare it to beta/final versions of competing apps.

Second, man, we don't care about who's on your ignore list. shh..

Edit: Third "Costs a lot more" well when you pay this <sarcasm>LIL' FORTUNE</sarcasm> of 29.95 (or something) you encourage them to continue the development of pioneering osx apps ( they're like one of the best osx only sw company ). Not only that, they're also only the (well, I think) company who aids other OSX devs by letting us use their wonderful frameworks for free. I'll add that they're not much of a big bad MS-style capitalist company: they really care about their employees and they want them to have fun at work in a pleasant environment (see the info in http://www.omnigroup.com/company/ ). So think twice before criticizing for free like that, I don't wanna lose the OmniGroup.

entrox · Apr 10, 2003, 04:54 PM

Ambush (and the others): please do not feed the trolls. Anomalous is a so obvious troll, that every reply to him just adds fuel to the fire. Just look at statements like "[...] I did not even try the beta. OmniWeb is not as good as than[sic] Safari [...]". If that's no troll, I really don't know what is.

ambush · Apr 10, 2003, 05:43 PM

Originally posted by entrox:
Ambush (and the others): please do not feed the trolls. Anomalous is a so obvious troll, that every reply to him just adds fuel to the fire. Just look at statements like "[...] I did not even try the beta. OmniWeb is not as good as than[sic] Safari [...]". If that's no troll, I really don't know what is.

an anti OmniGroup zealot?

Gul Banana · Apr 10, 2003, 07:53 PM

indeed. Anyway, I'm interested to see the rate of improvements; I'd come across a couple of crashing bugs, but they are fixed already in sp2, and resizing is.. less slow. The new helper application settings thing is nice, too - it was probably in 4.2, but I didn't notice it.

Hmm.. here's an interesting animated gif bug. It does not, like Safari, play the animation only once, and this is good. However, when displaying gifs with transparency, parts that were opaque in one frame but not the next are not cleared to the background colour, resulting in the appearance of all the frames being superimposed upon each other. Time for teh feedbax0rs.

MrBS · Apr 10, 2003, 08:09 PM

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
Hmm.. here's an interesting animated gif bug. It does not, like Safari, play the animation only once, and this is good. However, when displaying gifs with transparency, parts that were opaque in one frame but not the next are not cleared to the background colour, resulting in the appearance of all the frames being superimposed upon each other. Time for teh feedbax0rs.

Aye. That's all in 4.2 I believe.
~BS

milhouse · Apr 10, 2003, 11:09 PM

Just "rediscovering" OW today. It's quite nice. I never mind paying for SW i like.

Till this has tabs I'll be holding off on using it full time though.

Rendering is quite nice and it's plenty fast.

two thumbs up for Omni.

ratlater · Apr 11, 2003, 01:13 AM

sp3 is up at the usual place. OG says text problems are fixed, and after a quick run through it appears to be MUCH better. I'm very impressed with the quick progress being made on the sp's.

-matt

Catfish_Man · Apr 11, 2003, 01:49 AM

I have only four issues with SP3:
1) Crashes a bit
2) Crash catcher tries to use the old Classic mail program
3) Scrolling with my wheel mouse is much too fast
4) No tabs (which I know will be fixed in 5.0, apparently by something better than tabs)

MrBS · Apr 11, 2003, 01:59 AM

It's hard for me to use the SPs for any extended period of time... browsing the web with all the ads hurts my eyes. Makes me feel like I'm using WinIE. Okay, not that bad, but it's what makes me switch back to 4.2.
~BS

Tim2 at Omni · Apr 11, 2003, 02:03 AM

Originally posted by MrBS:
It's hard for me to use the SPs for any extended period of time... browsing the web with all the ads hurts my eyes. Makes me feel like I'm using WinIE. Okay, not that bad, but it's what makes me switch back to 4.2.
~BS

I'm going to be working on re-implementing the privacy settings tomorrow (as well as tracking down those pesky crashers). Keep your eye on the next few sneakypeeks! :-)

MrBS · Apr 11, 2003, 03:09 AM

Originally posted by Tim2 at Omni:
I'm going to be working on re-implementing the privacy settings tomorrow (as well as tracking down those pesky crashers). Keep your eye on the next few sneakypeeks! :-)

Excellent.

Thanks!
~BS

Gul Banana · Apr 11, 2003, 04:21 AM

The fixes for text rendering and transparent animations are great! I'm really impressed by the speed of bug fixing in general.

joelcpa · Apr 11, 2003, 04:28 AM

Originally posted by Tim2 at Omni:
I'm going to be working on re-implementing the privacy settings tomorrow (as well as tracking down those pesky crashers). Keep your eye on the next few sneakypeeks! :-)

That's great Tim, keep up the good work!

BZ · Apr 11, 2003, 07:03 AM

Looking better and better....

PalmInfocenter is not looking too good.

I also find SP3 (2/1) will stall in the middle of downloading a page. Sort of half rendered.

Bring back the privacy and lets get on with OW 5.0 SP1.

BZ

JKT · 09:10 AM

Originally posted by BZ:
Looking better and better....

PalmInfocenter is not looking too good.

I also find SP3 (2/1) will stall in the middle of downloading a page. Sort of half rendered.

Palminfocentre looks great as far as I can tell, what is wrong with it?

The stall is something that can happen in Safari too, I find. On the whole, sp3 is very quick for me, text rendering is now on a par with 4.2 and earlier and the odd quirks I was seeing appear to have gone. In fact, once the privacy prefs are repaired, I won't have (m)any complaints at all

However, can someone please tell me how I can increase the default text size here at MacNN forums? It is painfully tiny and hitting the increase Font size buttons isn't doing anything!

Edit: Tell a lie - I had to hit it a few times to get a noticeable increase... problem now is that other fonts here are enormous