Anyone care what I think?

[William Shipley]

> I've sent in a couple... But generally getting told that it's my
> set up and that I should use a crappy Mail program or lame terminal
> program instead of the one I like.

I find this characterization of our responses a bit of an exaggeration.  I  
can assure you we've never responded to anyone with "use the crappy mail or  
lame terminal."

In the early days we didn't have a hook to select which mail program was  
launched on Mailto: URLs.  We did not tell our customers who requested it to  
screw off.  We added a preference, a long time ago, and it's still there.   
So, thank you for your bug report, I wish you wouldn't use it against us that  
we didn't fix it when we did.

It's true that we still only message Terminal when launching telnet: URLs.   
I can't remember ever getting a bug report on this.  I also can't remember  
the last time I saw a telnet: URL, so it hasn't seemed a big issue.

> If you get it for academic
> purposes then they get a tax write off and a few more customers
> who will fell more apt to pay for it later

Not according to our accountant.  He says donated software doesn't count  
towards tax writeoffs.  Maybe he's nuts, but we donated a bunch of OmniWeb to  
a university once and it didn't do us a whit of good.

> Interface builder does allow you to create drop down menus

I don't like drop-down menu history.  I like having a separate window.  So  
do many customers.  But, you're suggestion has been noted, and if it seems a  
lot of people  want a drop-down menu, we'll look into it.

By the way, I'm pretty familiar with interface builder and programming  
NEXTSTEP in general, so don't feel obligated to suggest to me how I might  
implement a particular feature you want.

> And lately I've run into  the DNS problem.

Ken Case fixed this bug last night.  We'll get a release of 2.7.x out soon with it.

> Also why is the stop button broken. It seems like a simple
> idea. Do a straight kill of all

Lots of things seem like simple ideas but are harder to implement.  But, as  
it happens, I added this to OmniWeb 3 two weeks ago, and posted about it on  
this list.

> Things we've asked for and heard lame responses like Borderless
> frames.... "Not needed... it's new anyway..."

I don't know who responded this.  Again, if you can produce the mail I'd be  
surprised.  "Not needed?"  I don't think we said that.  We may have said it's  
new, meaning, no surprise that a program we wrote 18 months ago doesn't do  
it.  It's on our feature list for 3.0, we consider it necessary to keep  
current.

> And will there be a patch for OW 2.x users.

No.  No no and no.  Microsoft doesn't backpatch Windows 95 with DirectX,  
does it?  It's unreasonable to ask a small company that loses money putting  
out a web browser for NEXTSTEP to maintain two versions simply because you  
don't want to upgrade your system software.  If you were running MacOS 2.x,  
you also wouldn't have a lot of software that runs on your system.

> And as a quick note... why don't you do patches that fix and replace
> what needs fixing and replacing? Instead of having to get a whole
> new browser?

Because there is no simple interface to creating or installing patches.   
Because we don't want to spend a lot of time writing one when we could be  
concentrating on making OmniWeb better.

I promise you, if Apple's new installer for Rhapsody supports patches, we'll  
support them as well.

-Wil
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