Comments on OmniWeb 0.5

[Ernest Prabhakar]

Ken,

Beatiful product!  Thanks for making it available!  As HEP person who  
used the initial CERN NeXTSTEP front end, it's been humiliating to have  
to ask my X-based colleagues to 'borrow' their terminals to use Mosaic.  
:-)

Of course, I've got lots of comments.  You probably already know about  
them, but I guess you want them posted to the list so we have a  
complete list.

1) The Browser/History thing is really lovely.  It would be nice if the  
Help had an explanation of the History symbols, for the intuition  
impaired, with appropriate help links.

2) Is it possible to REMOVE a bookmark?  Sometimes I change my mind, or  
click the wrong one by mistake.  Yes, I know you can edit the  
Start.html file manually.

3) Can I change the default startup page?  Our group has a standard  
home page that we reference.  What do we need to do to get OmniWeb to  
append Bookmarks to that, instead of your page?

4) From "Archie" on the home page
	http://alpha.acast.nova.edu/software/AA.html
I get the following error:
		403 Forbidden
Your client does not have permission to get URL /software/AA.html from  
this server.

Is this normal?  It seems odd to have a non-functional link on the  
front page...

5) I tried to do a "search" on a Gopher page, but could find nowhere to  
type the text string to search on.  Oh yea, you don't support searches  
and forms.  Never mind.

6) I tried the NCSA Mosaic Multimedia Demo Page.
	http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/demoweb/demo.html
It showed the little "speaker" Icon, and played the first sound "You  
just clicked on the first sound icon".  Unfortunately, it ONLY played  
that sound, no matter which icon I clicked on - even the picture of Al  
Gore. :-)  Normal links still worked fine.

7) When trying for the "submissions" directory in cs.orst.edu, it  
tried:
	ftp://cs.orst.edu/submissions
Instead of
	ftp://cs.orst.edu/pub/next/submissions
Any idea why?  Also, does it need to lock up while transferring data?
It would be neat if one could use the browser to navigate FTP directory  
sites, if you know what I mean. Currently, it treats subdirectories as  
separate links, right?

8) When a link is selected, but not being accessed, could you change  
the Globe Icon [cute animation, by the way] to reflect the URL type?  
http: could default to globe, but ftp: and gopher: et al would look  
different.

9) Once it "opens" a document by downloading it, it often keeps the  
greyed out "Opening document so-and-so" in the status line for a while.

10) Could you set a default so that it will AUTOMATICALLY save files  
'to-be-open-ed' in /tmp, rather than prompting with the save panel?   
It's a nice feature to ask, but I'd prefer it be optional.

Well, that's all my comments for now.  Thanks for an incredible  
product.  I can't wait to show it off to my Mosaic-bound officemates  
(grin).

- Ernie P.