Improving OmniWeb

[Andreas Åkre Solberg]

> >      - Newer WebCore
> >            This is obvious, and OmniWeb know it's serious, and they
> > work
> >            with it. I mention it on the top to indicate that this 
> will
> >            always be the most important feature request.
>
> True, but I think they do a pretty good job with this.

Yup, agreed. But I put it on the top nontheless, because Safari is 
under continously developement, and keeping up with the webcore should 
be the number one priority.

> >      - Sidebar
> >            Opera and Firefox have it. And Safari with Saft. 
> Personally
> > I
> >            do not miss it that much, but some users might do.
>
> What goes in there exactly?  Bookmarks?  History?  I think the OW
> method is fine for both of these.  I could see it being of use as an
> alternate way to see these items, but I think OG tried this with the
> slide-out pane in pre 5.x.

What I mean by Panel is a horizontal split of the browser into two 
browser panels. The panel could be used for bookmarks, rss, news for 
pda sites, sending sms, etc. Opera has a lot of such panels:
http://my.opera.com/community/customize/panel/

But I just mention this, I do not feel very strong need for it my self. 
Omniweb has the workspace concept which might cancel out this need.

> >      - Inline search
> >            OmniWeb have support for inline link search, but I have 
> not
> >            found a way to do a general inline search. What about 
> doing
> >            an inline general search when holding down alt button, and
> >            link search when not, and a preference option to switch 
> the
> >            two. Opera support this native, and there are at least 
> three
> >            different plugins to Safari that add this feature.
>
> I'd like to see find in the way FireFox does it, with a bar at the
> bottom.  It can be awkward, but is really nice how it live searches.
> Then again, I think you can turn on live searching with a plist
> addition.  It won't give you a bar or anything, but you'll see words
> highlighted as they are found and you can go forward and backwards with
> the keyboard.  What OW really needs in this respect is a better manual
> that documents _everything_.

plist is not a good place to enable such a feature. I suppose this 
means that this is a hidden feature that OmniGroup do think is not 
ready for the public - and I hope they will finnish and enable this 
feature by default.

> >      - Do not refresh front tab
> >            Should be an option to not refresh the tab in the front,
> > even
> >            if the page has a META-ENV refresh tag attached to it 
> which
> >            most newspapers have. It is annoing when the page 
> refreshes
> >            when you are in the middle of the page. The Saft plugin to
> >            safari has this feature.
>
> I hate it when this happens.  I'd love a way to turn off meta refresh
> in _every_ instance.  This behavior only where the refresh will lead to
> the same page would be a nice feature as well.

I think this should be an option and probably a part of the site 
preference, because some sites I want this turned on. Some sites 
provides live updates of "a thing" and needs to be updated several 
times a minute.

> > - - Crash reporter
> >      - Should send the mail automatically
> >            Without starting up Mail.app.
>
> I think this would require including a mail server (you can't assume
> the user has a mail server installed and turned on) or issuing HTTP
> POST commands (if OW has crashed, you can't rely on being able to send
> HTTP commands).

As far as you are connected to the internet, and the smtp server 
omnigroup is running, there is no need for a separate server, the mail 
could be sent by a simple smtp session. But I agree with Walter that 
this is not very important, and some people prefer using mail.app, even 
if it is several more clicks away.

> >      - Shrink and stretch the height of tabs.
> >            Depending of the height of the window and the number of
> > tabs.
> >            John Gruber has mentioned this earlier:
> >            daringfireball.netÑomniweb_5_public_beta
> >            <http://daringfireball.net/2004/02/omniweb_5_public_beta>
>
> You can always use tabs without a preview.  I think auto-sizing like
> the dock would be interesting.  The width could stay the same, with the
> size of the preview shrinking until it is only as high as the tab
> minimum.  Nice.

Excatly as I imagined it. Obvously horizontal size should not be 
changed, and the horizontal size should only change the canvas for the 
preview not shrink the image it self.

>
> >      - Individual block list
> >            Should be a block list for each site preferences
> > individually
> >            in addition to the global one.
>
> I thought you could do this.  You can always use the allow list to
> mimic this.

No, you cannot. How can i block /foobar/ from the nice.com server ? If 
I add nice.com to the allow list then the complete domain is 
whitelisted, which is not what I want.

> >      - Synchronization
> >            Synchronization of bookmarks via WEBDAV is a brilliant
> >            feature. I would like if OmniWeb moved the Site Preference
> >            section away from the com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5.plist file, 
> and
> >            into a separate plist file which optionally can be stored
> >            over WEBDAV. Maybe saving workspaces info to WEBDAV could 
> be
> >            done in the same batch :D
> >      - Improved "Filter Image"
> >            When Ctrl+clicking on an image you can add the url of the
> >            image to the block list with the option "Filter Image".
> >            Instead this should popup a dialog a input field entering
> > the
> >            url, and regex-ed url preselected. This way the user can
> >            change parts of the url to .* to match more generally. 
> Look
> >            at the AdBlock extention to firefox.
>
> It'd be a nice addition.  Currently you have to open the prefs to edit
> the string, where you _can_ use regexp.  I do wish that you could
> _remove_ elements and not just not load them.

Agree. It should be optionally. Both should be possible. A checkbox for 
each block entry or something.

> The way FireFox and Pith
> allow you too remove iFrames or remove an image and have the page
> change shape.  I think it's come up before that OW shouldn't change the
> page layout.  I believe that if the user wants to change the layout,
> they should be allowed.  It could always be adjusted on a site by site
> pref.

..or by site prefs as you suggested. I think I like your suggestion 
best.

> >      - Status for RSS bookmarks/feeds
> >            It is a problem that each RSS entry which is new get 
> status
> >            "Unviewed content". I want to subscribe to a lot of RSS
> >            feeds, and only scroll through them to see if there is
> >            something interesting. This way at average I got a couple 
> of
> >            hundred RSS entries with status "Unviewed content". This
> >            result in a situation where all my regular sites that I
> > watch
> >            for changes drowns. My suggestion on how to approach this
> >            problem is to add another status type for bookmarks like
> >            "Unviewed RSS entry" or similar with a separate entry, 
> and a
> >            separate smart-folder in bookmarks view to show them all.
>
> Or a separate count for RSS.

That was my intention; a separate status imply a separate counter for 
the number of bookmarks/rss entries with this number.