Future of OmniWeb and what OmniWeb needs!

[Jeff Macht]

Anyone who wants the source (a little convoluted) to Autocomplete.plugin can
have it. It is on my web page right now
(http://www.pobox.com/~jamacht/PlugIns/). It compiled on Mac OS X Server
just fine. It is GPLed.

There are some problems with it, but if you liked the way it worked in
OmniWeb 3.x, you'll find it just fine.

"wouldn't be very hard to write": not so sure about that. The majority of
this thing was written Labor Day 1998, so the time required was not very
long. But the difficulty is another matter.

There are plenty of places where I used class-dump to find out about OmniWeb
internals. For instance, the OWPersistentHistoryManager is absolutely
required. Also, I used the internals of some NeXT classes, for example
NSTextField, to get the field manager and do a programatic partial selection
of text. You will see occasional fragments of code that is commented out.
This is because I was playing with a IE style drop down completions list. I
can't remember what happened, but it did not work out so well.

Has Omni opened up API access to the History? Meaning, it would be better if
it were [persistentHistoryObj historyArray] rather than
[persistentHistoryObj addressCount] and [persistentHistoryObj
addressAtIndex:(int)]. If so, the performance can be much better, in
addition to working properly. If not, we'll continue to have slowness. My
idea of slow happened on an AMD K6-233. A Motorola G4 at any speed is much
faster than the CPU of my lowly OPENSTEP box.

I believe Omni has added shortcuts to the URL bar in OmniWeb 4. I do not
know how this feature will affect the usage of my plugin.

I don't have a Mac. I bought a nice PC laptop instead. That should be my
.signature.

Jeff.

--
  I don't have a Mac.
  Jeff Macht
  http://www.pobox.com/~jamacht


----- Original Message -----
From: Ryan Dingman
On Wednesday, January 10, 2001, at 07:20 PM, Jeff Waddell wrote:

1. Auto-fill

There was once a plugin for OW that implemented this feature, but I don't
know if the author is going to port it to OW 4.0. It wouldn't be very hard
to write at all, but it would have to be something that could be turned off
because personally I hate auto compete. Are you just refering to the URL
field or all text fields like IE? Who knows -- maybe I'll write one.