It seems like a very, very long time ago that we were mired in planning sessions for OmniWeb 5. By “we” I mean “people much smarter than myself”, of course, although I do take credit for the never-implemented Wholesome History Populator feature (replace your day of youtube surfing and WoW geekfests with the browsing history of your choice! Pre-loaded contents include “Honey I Was Thinking Of You”, several hours worth of Amazon-combing for that perfect birthday gift; “Just Doing Some Market Research”, a trail of crumbs leading through a variety of industry topics to impress your boss; and, in worse-case scenarios, “What's This Funny Rash”, a thorough search of WebMD that virtually guarantees the subject of how much time you spend online will never be questioned).
But anyway, back then we put a lot of effort into building new features for OmniWeb. It was an exciting time for the OmniWeb development process as things like workspaces and graphical tabs and shortcuts started emerging from the alpha-soup and we all started using them. A huge amount of work later, OmniWeb 5 shipped: ta da!
Then, after a while, we had to catch up with WebKit. We had to get OmniWeb's compatibility and performance back up to par, we needed a Universal release, we needed some fixes. And so for many months now, the OmniWeb dev team has been chipping away at the non-fun stuff; not cool features or eye-popping UI, but the complicated headachey stuff under the hood that makes a web browser, you know, work.
(“Stuff”. Niiice. Once again my less-than-viselike grip on the technical aspects of our work has failed us all.)
We realize that in order for OmniWeb to stay in your Dock, we have to continue innovating. We need to do what we're best at: developing useful, fun features that work the way you want them to. Upcoming versions of OmniWeb need to kick ass and take names, basically. And that's what we want to do.
However, in the meantime, I don't want to lose sight of a huge accomplishment by our Web team: OmniWeb 5.5 is out. The final release, after months of hard work and persistent beta testers (for whom we are insanely grateful) and an espresso machine that has broken about fifty-three times from overuse.
If you haven't used OmniWeb in a while, I recommend trying 5.5 out. This version doesn't provide you with many citrus-scented whistles and bells, but it's faster. It's better. It's performance is vastly improved, and hey, it still has all the unique stuff that 5.0 was touted for.
A big congratulations to the OmniWeb team, and now we can start turning our attention to the next versions of OmniWeb. Yes, there will be some small fixer-upper 5.5x releases, but then? Features, by god. Honestly, I don't know if the coffee machine can handle it.
Yesterday we released a new beta of OmniDazzle 1.0.1, and today we released new betas of OmniPlan 1.0, OmniOutliner 3.6.1, and OmniWeb 5.5. So if you're a user of any of these products, you might want to check out the latest versions! There are links to all of these at www.omnigroup.com, or you can go directly to the beta of your choice using one of these links:
Enjoy!
• Now a Universal binary
• Based off a slightly customized version of WebKit.*
• Supports user defined style sheets
• Gets whites whiter, plumps when you cook it
* Greatly improved website compatibility, speed and stability. Many rendering and compatibility issues users have been experiencing should now be addressed.
Go forth and download, OmniWeb fans!
Well! Apparently our OmniWeb 5.5 beta whooped some butt in a recent browser test.
I'd love to tell you exactly why OmniWeb was so darn fast, but uhhhh….we're not exactly sure. It might have to do with something called garbage collection, which I would explain in great detail except I have no idea what it means. Also, benchmark tests are maybe not 100% indicative of what your own personal browsing experience will be, so take it all with a large grain of salt, but…go, OmniWeb, go!
OmniWeb 5.5 is still in 'private' beta (not exactly PRIVATE when it's in a benchmark test, I guess), but we're shooting for a public beta next week. Hang in there, OmniWeb fans!
:::
In other news, Omni has a Brand New Secret Product in the works. Before you ask, we are absolutely still working on our other apps – there are, let's see…11 engineers here who are assigned to various projects, in addition to product managers and support folk and sales and QA and of course, the espresso machine – and we still plan to provide you with updates for those (yes, like OmniWeb! And OmniGraffle! And…everything else! Except Oni; you Oni people need to CEASE and DESIST).
Anyway! We are getting very close to opening the kimono on Brand New Secret Product, if you'll forgive me for using a cheesy dotcom-VC-wooing term from 1999. Would you like some hints? SURE YOU WOULD.
Hint the First:
Some of you have asked for this product. Repeatedly.
Hint the Second:
Here is an annoyingly blurred image of the product's application icon:
Hint the Third:
It is NOT a replacement for Mail. Or a word processor.
(I know, I know. Pre-release hype kills kittens, etc. “Remember the Segway”, etc. I know.)
Now for the fun part: if you guess what Brand New Secret Product is, we'll get you on a private beta to start looking at it. You'll have to be sworn to secrecy – on pain of…well, maybe not death, but cake? cake or death? – but you'll be among the ELITE, the BRAVE, the, um, BUGGY BETA BRUTE SQUAD!
Or…wait, did I not make that sound attractive enough? What I meant to say is, if you guess correctly, you'll have an early, exclusive sneak peek at our biggest new product of the year. Cooooool.
HIE YE TO THE COMMENTS SECTION, make your guess, and don't forget to include your email address.
(Update: in order for me to have a snowball's chance of going through everyone's guesses, comments are now closed. Thanks for all your interest, folks!)
Let me tell you, it's not always easy being a non-technical person in an office of engineers. It's like bumbling your way through a foreign country where everyone knows the native tongue except you.
Engineer: “You'll need to use an ssh tunnel to access that.”
Me: “Okay. So are we talking an actual, physical tunnel here, or…?”
Engineer: “....”
I'm a n00b, what can I say. I'm intimidated by the Terminal (gah, the name alone: terminal!), acronyms befuddle me (TCP? VPN? what?), and AppleScript may as well be that African click language for all of my (in)ability to grasp its vernacular.
On the plus side, I like to think I can provide the lowest-denominator usability cases for our software. Sure, most of our applications can do complex operations and have all kinds of advanced settings, but hey–*I* can use them. Me, the mouthbreather who once clicked an emailed document screenshot…not once, not twice, but three times in a row, each time cursing the software's inability to perform.
The point of this post is actually not to convince you of the amount of oxygen whistling merrily through my skull, but to share some everyday, real life uses of our software in the hopes you'll do the same.
I use OmniOutliner to keep a running tally of household items I need to buy (on my list right now: “Spot Magic” carpet cleaner. Stupid cat), to draft writing projects, to keep track of who got what over the holidays (thus reducing the chance of gifting Relative So-and-So with yet another singing bass fish) (not that I would ever purchase such a corny novelty item), to plan vacation-related to-do items, and to store random bits of research I want to follow up on later.
I use OmniWeb's Workspaces feature to rattle through the giant list of blogs I visit daily; Shortcuts to quickly jump to IMDB, All Recipes, and Weather.com; and site-specific preferences to de-lamify sites with great content but obnoxious presentation.
Now with OmniGraffle, I don't typically spend a lot of time making complicated charts with all kinds of links and Bezier-drawn shapes and tables and whatnot (although I would be remiss in my Marketing Weasel duty if I did not point out that Graffle can obviously do all of those things), but I did make some downright spiffy holiday cards with OmniGraffle, and I'm currently using it to lay out a tile design for a bathroom remodel. And I made a process document for dealing with my eight-month-old son if he wakes up at night. Oh, you think I'm kidding?
Okay, quid pro quo time. If you're inclined, we'd love to see how you're using our apps in your day to day life, be they geeky tech examples that I'll have to have someone explain to me in monosyllabic terms, or otherwise. Hit the Say It! (Don't Spray It!) button and let us know.
“What about OmniWeb? Won't somebody please think of OmniWeb?”
We have, I swear. As it turns out, developing a web browser is pretty time-consuming work, especially when there's a limited number of engineers available for the task. Oh, you can stamp your foot all you want and shout outside their doors that you want to release OmniWeb 5.5 RIGHT NOW, but it won't do you any good. Believe me, I've tried.
We're making progress, though. Currently OmniWeb 5.5, which is a Universal release using the latest version of WebKit (revision 12177 at the moment, although we're updating it to be based on r13269), is in private beta. Our plan is to open this up to a public beta in the next couple weeks, with the usual warnings in place (OmniWeb 5.5 beta is in flux, has known issues, may wrinkle your linen pants, etc).
With the WebKit update, 5.5 is meant to offer an improved browsing experience over 5.1x; better speed and compatibility are the main benefits in this newest release. We've also added a number of other fixes and updates, which you can peruse at your leisure here.
Hang in there, OmniWeb fans! We have not deserted you, we leave no browser behind.
Here's a peek at 5.5 (clickity-click for larger image), although there isn't a lot that looks different from 5.1. Note the unified toolbar, site-specific preferences for using your own style sheets to view websites, and the WebKit Web Inspector feature (currently not a default in OmniWeb).
