[Developer]

I don't know what RSS is.

[Rickster]

There's a quasi-standard XML schema, sometimes called RSS or RDF, which is often used for providing content summaries of web pages. They're popular on an increasing number of news websites and among the weblogging crowd

Apps which can parse these RSS/RDF/XML "News feeds" show you the useful information from a web page without actually loading the whole thing. For example, I've subscribed to a few newsfeeds in my OW5, letting me see a list of the top headlines at Slashdot and MacNN and the latest posts on my favorite blogs -- if I see an interesting headline, I can load it up in the web browser. It's a much more accurate way of keeping on top of the latest info from you favorite sites than OmniWeb 4's auto bookmark checking provides.

There are a few apps built entirely for reading RSS feeds -- NetNewsWire is the most popular. But since one often ends up using a web browser in conjunction with one of those apps, we thought it'd be a good thing to build one app that does both.

[ratlater]

Originally posted by Tim2 at Omni:
Yep. You can also double click the items and they open up in iTMS.

Edit: Image removed

Woohoo! That's awesome. Now if only this stupid January would hurry and get out the way...

-matt

[Nebagakid]

hey, don't you wish away time. Cherish it.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Rickster:
There's a quasi-standard XML schema, sometimes called RSS or RDF, which is often used for providing content summaries of web pages. They're popular on an increasing number of news websites and among the weblogging crowd

RDF? Steve Jobs is fond of that one, I'll bet.

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
RDF? Steve Jobs is fond of that one, I'll bet.

I don't know... can anyone really say with a straight face that they've ever been under the influence of Steve's Resource Description Framework?

Sounds like a Microsoft-ism to me.

[Developer]

So RSS is a quasi XML Resource Description Field for web site summaries. That knowledge might be handy some time.

What that can do in the real world for me I guess I have to see when it is released.

[nickm]

What that can do in the real world for me I guess I have to see when it is released.

You don't have to wait for Omniweb 5. Download NetNewsWire NOW and join the future.

I'm really hoping that OW5 can replace NNW for me; that will free up another space in my Dock.

[gregomni]

Originally posted by nickm:
I'm really hoping that OW5 can replace NNW for me; that will free up another space in my Dock.

It probably depends upon how many feeds you generally use with NNW. We're not attempting to match NNW feature for feature, so if you use a lot of the stuff in NNW you probably won't be able to completely replace it with OW5. (Which makes sense since NNW costs _more_ than OW5 and just does RSS feeds.)

On the other hand, the OW5 support works great for my needs (4 or 5 feeds that I pay attention to).

[Nebagakid]

did anyone see that New York Times article in the Circuits section about an entire research team is trying to find out the best way to keep track of bookmarks and websites.... maybe they should look like OmniWeb

[Rickster]

I posted this thread in the GUI customization board, but in case you didn't catch it there...

We'll be producing an official add-on for OW5 to allow easy switching of icon sets or "themes", and we'd like to bundle a few third-party sets with it. So, if you (or someone you know) would like to contribute some icons/widgets, please (have them) contact us. Contributors will get documentation and beta versions for testing their work, and we'll be giving free OW5 licenses (and/or other goodies) to artists whose themes are included in the final package.


On the RSS topic: we'd like to eventually replace standalone news aggregator apps like NNW, as some of us feel it's a little silly to have a separate app for that if it's going to be feeding links to the web browser often. But in 5.0 our RSS functionality will be rather basic; it doesn't really compete in the same space as "pro" newsreaders like NNW, but users of simpler solutions like NNW Lite may find that OW5 does everything they need.

[Developer]

Originally posted by nickm:
You don't have to wait for Omniweb 5. Download NetNewsWire NOW and join the future.

I don't see the use. Why would I want to view a summary of a site? I just go to the site and view it as is. All the sites (SPIEGEL, heise, MacNN etc.) already offer summaries of their articles on the front page. Summary service can only make it worse.

[jcb9]

Originally posted by Developer:
I don't see the use. Why would I want to view a summary of a site? I just go to the site and view it as is. All the sites (SPIEGEL, heise, MacNN etc.) already offer summaries of their articles on the front page. Summary service can only make it worse.

Because it can often be a lot simpler. In my copy of NetNewsWire Lite, I am subscribed to 27 sites, including Mac sites, news sites, and weblogs. To see if these sites have updated, I could visit all 27 pages separately on the web...or I could just tab over to NetNewsWire Lite and see all the potential updates at a glance. It's unbelievably handy.

[MrBS]

Or you could just use OW and have any updated sites be available from the dock icon.

~BS

(doesn't work with every site, but incredibly useful

[unlinear]

RSS is not RDF.

RSS 0.9x is XML
RSS 1.0 is RDF (is XML)
RSS 2.0 is XML

RSS 2.0 and 1.0 are 'competing standards' -- one taking Really Simple Syndication and expanding it (2.0) one applying the 0.9x principles to RDF and changing the meaning of RSS to RDF Site Summary.

Meanwhile, Atom, a new standard, is being developed to avoid the limitations of both 1.0 and 2.0; Atom 0.3 was recently released however it's still a format that is in flux.

And yes, Atom is also an API, but let's not get into that.

[jcb9]

Originally posted by MrBS:
Or you could just use OW and have any updated sites be available from the dock icon.

~BS

(doesn't work with every site, but incredibly useful

Yeah, but RSS gives you more information. OmniWeb tells you that sites have been updated - RSS readers (soon to include OW) give you headlines and excerpts - in some cases, the entire article.

[nickm]

I don't see the use. Why would I want to view a summary of a site? I just go to the site and view it as is.

Suppose you have a site that changes infrequently. If you just 'go to the site' then you'll find yourself going there all the time to discover that nothing has changed. RSS feeds are a way for you to only go to the site when something new is posted.

I have 22 sites that I track in NetNewsWire, most of which are updated 1-2 times a week, and some as infreqently as once every a month. It would be a royal pain to go to those 22 sites every day just to find the 4 or 5 that have been updated. Instead, I let NetNewsWire do the work, and it lets me know what's new.

Also, because RSS is a 'pull' format, there is a much lower overhead to following a site. I'd be very reluctant to give someone my email address to send 'announcements' of new content, because I'd be worried that I wouldn't be able to turn off the announcements if I didn't want them any more. With RSS, I can turn off my subscription at any point without having to interact with the provider of the feed.

Many sites without RSS have fallen off my radar. I have a good friend who has a webpage, but I only remember to check it once every couple of months. If he had an RSS feed, I would no doubt check it within a couple of hours of his posting an announcement.

[nickm]

We're not attempting to match NNW feature for feature, so if you use a lot of the stuff in NNW you probably won't be able to completely replace it with OW5. (Which makes sense since NNW costs _more_ than OW5 and just does RSS feeds.)

Well, NNW Lite is free, so there is a free alternative to the RSS features in OW5. Still, I view integration with the browser as a feature that isn't present in NNW. Though, strangely, with the inclusion of Webkit NNW is turning it into a microbrowser. There has been some debate on whether aggregators and browsers should be separate applications, but it seems pretty straightforward to me that the browser should take over the role of the aggregator in the future. Omniweb 5 is a start in that direction.

As for whether OW5 can replace NNW for me, you tell me. Currently, I use a combination of Omniweb 4 bookmarks and NetNewsWire feeds to track site updates. In general, I prefer feeds to bookmarks because:

1. they're accurate. Omniweb 4 does a good job of finding changes in sites, but it often comes up with false positives when a site has no new content but has changed in some subtle way that tickles the update filter. RSS is designed expressly for tracking updates, so it doesn't have this problem.

2. It's an index. Occasionally I want to go back to an article I read before. I'm not going to manually bookmark every article on a site, so if I track the site through an Omniweb bookmark I have to first go to the main page and search for the article I want. With RSS, each feed contains a set of headlines, so it is easier to go directly to the article you want if it was a recent one.

3. I don't want to read some headlines. With Omniweb 4's updating bookmarks, all I know is that a site is updated, but I don't get any more information than that. With RSS, I can read the headline, and sometimes known that I don't care to read the article (for example, I don't care about Linux articles on ArsTechnica, even though I read most of the other articles).

Now, Omniweb 5 understand RSS, so point 1 is taken care of. Likewise, the screenshots I've seen indicated that I can get the entire index of a feed and the headlines, so points 2 and 3 are also handled. The only remaining question is whether the interface for scanning and opening updated sites is smooth or clunky. I actually find NNW kind of clunky, for reasons I won't go into now, so it looks like OW5 may be a winner for me.

[larkost]

I too use NNW Lite, and look forward to having this functionality built into my browser of choice. I hope that I will be able to use OmniWeb's RSS reader like I do NNWLite, that is onlyusing the dock icon and a right-click to get the headlines, and "mark as read" the majority of headlines that I don't want to read. For those I do want to read, I simply click on the doc menu listing and it fires up in OW.

[flysky]

Two feature questions:

1. Contextual menus. I've posted this in other OW threads on this and other boards (maybe even in this thread), but I'd like to be able to get Services into the contextual menu in OW 5. I currently use ICeCoffEE to get it into CM's for most applications, but it doesn't work with OW. I know that the Apple HIG discourage putting Services in CM's, but I'd like to see it as an option in OW 5. Alternatively, can you at least allow ICeCoffEE to add it?

2. Autofill. I've heard a little discussion of this, but I'd like to hear more about whether and how it's been improved in OW 5. Any chance that OW and Safari can share the same info? (i.e. that OW 5 will be able to use the same information that Safari has about how to fill fields at various sites?)

[Rickster]

Supporting third-party "hacks" is one of our lowest priorities, but we may be able to take a brief look at the ICeCoffEE issue.

As for sharing autofill info with Safari, chances of that are fairly slim. For one thing, some of our new autofill features don't really translate well to the way Safari handles autofill. More importantly, though, we can't access their autofill data file -- it's encrypted. The decryption key is stored in the keychain, but that's only helpful if you know the details of the encryption scheme. Reverse engineering private Apple encrypted file formats is also pretty low on our priority list.

Oh, I guess the special autofill features haven't really been covered in public announcements yet, have they? Foremost among them is that we now support autofill sets, or profiles -- you can choose whether pressing the AutoFill button will fill in your home address or your work address, for example. These sets automatically use information with the same label (home vs work, etc) from the Mac OS X Address Book, and when you add extra info you can choose to make it specific to a set or available no matter which set you're currently filling in forms with.

[flysky]

Originally posted by Rickster:
Supporting third-party "hacks" is one of our lowest priorities, but we may be able to take a brief look at the ICeCoffEE issue.

As for sharing autofill info with Safari, chances of that are fairly slim. For one thing, some of our new autofill features don't really translate well to the way Safari handles autofill. More importantly, though, we can't access their autofill data file -- it's encrypted. The decryption key is stored in the keychain, but that's only helpful if you know the details of the encryption scheme. Reverse engineering private Apple encrypted file formats is also pretty low on our priority list.

Oh, I guess the special autofill features haven't really been covered in public announcements yet, have they? Foremost among them is that we now support autofill sets, or profiles -- you can choose whether pressing the AutoFill button will fill in your home address or your work address, for example. These sets automatically use information with the same label (home vs work, etc) from the Mac OS X Address Book, and when you add extra info you can choose to make it specific to a set or available no matter which set you're currently filling in forms with.

Thanks for the response, Rick. Sounds like Autofill has been well enhanced.

As for the Services menu, just to be clear, I don't specifically care about support for ICeCoffEE in OW 5. (Hack enabling should be low on your priority list.) I'd just like some means of getting Services into the contextual menu. If you can unofficially support it as a preference, even a hidden one, that would be good enough for me.

Thanks again. Looking forward to 2/2.

[aged]

TextExtras is one of those third party products that can cause 4.5 to crash predictably. It's also one of those low-priority items--and I'd much rather have 5.0 out the door than have this fixed. I was just wondering if it's been tested with 5.0 and found to work less well, the same, or better.

Specifics: hitting escape (F5 by default) to invoke completion on text that is not in the TE completion dictionary always causes a crash--type carefully.

[Cadaver]

8 days and counting. Can't wait.

[Nebagakid]

Originally posted by Cadaver:
8 days and counting. Can't wait.

But you must! Unless, you HAXXOR your way into the OmniGroup's computators, man, if you did that you would be so ****ing l33t...... skulzz

Man, if OmniGroup was nice and all, they would start posting more details five days before the public beta in a "5 Reasons for 5 is Fab" sort of thing. See? I should be in marketing, or in a deep deep hole.

[Mike S.]

Originally posted by Nebagakid:
Man, if OmniGroup was nice and all, they would start posting more details five days before the public beta in a "5 Reasons for 5 is Fab" sort of thing. See? I should be in marketing, or in a deep deep hole.

Nothing like some over-the-top, Apple style, pre-event marketing to make people bitch, whine, complain about and utterly despise a product when it isn't everything one expected it would be!

I'm going to assume that on Feb. 2nd OW 5 is going to be a beta quality app with crashes and stuff that doesn't work the way I thought. I wouldn't be surprised if it were slower than the current release either but then these are things one should expect from a beta.

If OW5 Final is the same then one truly has something to bitch, whine, complain about and utterly despise...

[bpsmith]

Is Atom support planned in addition to RSS/RDF?

[Gee4orce]

While we're talking about RSS newsreaders, it's worth mentioning Shrook - it's better than NNW IMO, because it can work through an authenticating proxy (so I can use it from work) and it also has a 'web view', so you can view the web page in question right there in the newsreader.

Another benefit of newsreaders that nobody has touched on is 'aggregation' - ie you can view, in a single location, headlines from any number of sources. You don't really care what the source is, it's the story itself that's important. ie. I want to check out the progress of the Mars robot landers - I click on the 'Science' folder in Shrook, filter by the word 'Mars' and there are all the headlines I want, from multiple sources (space.com, New Scientist, BBC News, etc).

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by Gee4orce:
Another benefit of newsreaders that nobody has touched on is 'aggregation' - ie you can view, in a single location, headlines from any number of sources. You don't really care what the source is, it's the story itself that's important. ie. I want to check out the progress of the Mars robot landers - I click on the 'Science' folder in Shrook, filter by the word 'Mars' and there are all the headlines I want, from multiple sources (space.com, New Scientist, BBC News, etc).

You can kind of do that with OW5 -- if you have a bunch of RSS feeds, you can do a bookmark search for "mars" and all of the RSS feed items with "mars" in their titles/addresses/notes will show up.

[MrBS]

Originally posted by Gee4orce:
You don't really care what the source is, it's the story itself that's important.

Kind of a dangerous view there... especially now when it seems to held by lots of news organizations.

~BS

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by MrBS:
Kind of a dangerous view there... especially now when it seems to held by lots of news organizations.

~BS

Are you trying to imply that FOX News isn't entirely Fair and Balanced? Holy crap!

[larkost]

Are you trying to imply that FOX News isn't entirely Fair and Balanced? Holy crap!

FOX News is "Fair" and "Balanced" Tim.

"Fair" as in "Fair to midlands" -> upper midwestern for "not particularly good, but too polite to say it"

"Balanced" as in their news anchors have to walk down a line on the ground every morning touching their noses with alternating fingers to prove that they still have enough balance to walk upright...

Remember, politics is all about defining your words properly...

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by larkost:
"Balanced" as in their news anchors have to walk down a line on the ground every morning touching their noses with alternating fingers to prove that they still have enough balance to walk upright...

Now... Let's not get this thread locked by going way too far off topic!

[MrBS]

Originally posted by Tim2 at Omni:
Are you trying to imply that FOX News isn't entirely Fair and Balanced? Holy crap!

Fair and balanced are over rated... they had a cg jet morph into an eagle with a waving american flag as the backdrop... how can you argue with that???


But back OT.... only 7 days, ::checks watch:: okay still 7 days. It's going to be a long week.

~BS

[ratlater]

Originally posted by MrBS:
Fair and balanced are over rated... they had a cg jet morph into an eagle with a waving american flag as the backdrop... how can you argue with that???


But back OT.... only 7 days, ::checks watch:: okay still 7 days. It's going to be a long week.

~BS

At least Sunday is the super bowl, so we can get trashed then groggily wake up on monday to a shiny OW 5. You OW guys are gonna release it in the morning...aren't you!?!?

-matt

[Mike S.]

Speaking of the beta, is this going to be a true public beta or for registered users only?

Will you be offering SP builds between betas for registered users?

[Gee4orce]

Originally posted by MrBS:
Kind of a dangerous view there... especially now when it seems to held by lots of news organizations.

~BS

Your comment didn't run through my (British) English parser correctly - if you're saying that it's dangerous to take a story off the internet at face value without checking the source, yes I agree.However, I assumed that you would only add reliable news sources to your RSS feeds in the first place !

[Krypton]

Originally posted by Mike S.:
Speaking of the beta, is this going to be a true public beta or for registered users only?

Will you be offering SP builds between betas for registered users?

For registered users only - thus they aren't inundated with a torrent of bug reports.

[Nebagakid]

6 days left
YIPERE!

[jcb9]

Originally posted by Krypton:
For registered users only - thus they aren't inundated with a torrent of bug reports.

Is this a fact, or are you just guessing? I don't see any indication of this on Omni Group's webpage - they call it a public beta, which to me would seem to indicate it'll be, well, public.

[Nebagakid]

I think he is going on what OmniGroup has done in the past..

[TC]

Originally posted by Krypton:
For registered users only - thus they aren't inundated with a torrent of bug reports.

You'd have thought that would be a good reason for a public preview. Get it running on as many systems as possible to find bugs before releasing the final version.

[cpac]

So Safari 1.2 was seeded to developers - once it comes out, OW will be a couple versions behind.

I know 5.0 is going to be released with the same version of Webcore as 4.5 is using, and that the upgrade will be incorporated later (5.01? 5.1?)

What I'm hoping, though, is that we'll get to skip strait to whatever the final version of webcore in Safari 1.2 is...

Is this possible Omnipeople? (or would you need to make the modifications to intermediate versions of Webcore before moving on to the version in 1.2?)

And I realize any response would be a very rough guesstimate, but assuming 5.0 final is released in March, what sort of time frame would we be looking at for a webcore upgrade?

[Krypton]

Originally posted by jcb9:
Is this a fact, or are you just guessing? I don't see any indication of this on Omni Group's webpage - they call it a public beta, which to me would seem to indicate it'll be, well, public.

I am recalling from memory - I'm sure it's written in this thread officially somewhere.

OW 4.5 pre release required a license to run, which further supports my claim.

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by cpac:
What I'm hoping, though, is that we'll get to skip strait to whatever the final version of webcore in Safari 1.2 is...

We would very likely integrate the latest version of WebCore. There's no need to merge in intermediate versions, since the latest WebCore will already include the changes from those versions.

I can't commit to a particular timeframe, but I can pretty much guarantee that we will sync up with Safari some time after 5.0 is released. We're not going to let ourselves get too far behind in rendering/speed like we did with 4.0-4.2.

[TimmyDee51]

Originally posted by TC:
You'd have thought that would be a good reason for a public preview. Get it running on as many systems as possible to find bugs before releasing the final version.

The issue at hand was the signal-to-noise ratio. When Omni did a public preview, they got a ton of emails about bugs, but sifting through them for the quality reports was tough. Now they're focusing their testing efforts on people really committed to the product (they way I see it) and thus should get better results. Plus, there's got to be an advantage to registering, right?

[cpac]

Originally posted by Tim2 at Omni:
We would very likely integrate the latest version of WebCore. There's no need to merge in intermediate versions, since the latest WebCore will already include the changes from those versions.

good to hear.

[nickm]

You'd have thought that would be a good reason for a public preview. Get it running on as many systems as possible to find bugs before releasing the final version.

Rickster has said in this thread that there are tens of thousands of registered Omniweb users. This is certainly a broad enough base to discover any bugs that may exist.

It seems to me that even registered Omniweb users is too large a base for a useful beta program; The Omnigroup has only a handful of support people (it can't be more than 3 or 4). Their time would be better spent going over the reports from a few users in detail rather than reading hundreds of identical complaints.

[sjk]

Originally posted by nickm:
Their time would be better spent going over the reports from a few users in detail rather than reading hundreds of identical complaints.

I've often wished more software companies posted lists of commonly reported bugs, problems, and feature requests so people could check them first (time permitting) before submitting redundant reports. And too often reports get mixed in with more general discussions on forums and mailing lists, which really isn't a convenient place to search for them.

[Anderton]

RSS integration is a great addition to Omniweb. I using it right now as a sidebar in Mozilla Firebird 0.8+, and it's very handy to have the feeds in the sidebar for quick access.