768 With its third public beta release, OmniWeb 5.0 has become usable for regular browsing rather than just checking out its raft of interesting and innovative features. At least I was able to use it for my browsing session last evening that would normally have been conducted with Safari and experienced none of the crashes or hangs that plagued the first two public beta releases.

OmniWeb 5 is still slower than either Safari or Firefox, but it's not bad and hopefully will improve as the coding gets more streamlined. There are still rough edges to be polished. In particular I found that the Bookmarks screen's determination to return to default configuration when what I wanted was to keep using my imported Safari bookmarks annoying.

In order to give beta 3 the best shot at stable performance, I trashed both the OmniWeb 5 preferences and the OmniWeb folder from the Application Support folder in my Home Library before starting up the browser. The files to delete are:

~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5/
~/Library/Preferences/com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5.plist

That necessitated re-importing by bookmarks from Safari and reconfiguring the preferences to my liking, but OmniWeb 5's Preferences dialog is so cool that was almost a pleasure.

Happily, OmniWeb 5, which is based on the Safari browser engine, supports OS X Services, which is something I miss a lot in Firefox and iCab.

OmniWeb is a full-featured native web browser for Mac OS X, highly multi-threaded and written using Apple's advanced Cocoa frameworks.

New features in OmniWeb 5.

Tabs
Most browsers have tabs, but OmniWeb builds on the idea of viewing multiple web pages in a single window by offering thumbnails and powerful drag and drop capabilities.

When you create a new tab in your tab drawer, a thumbnail graphic allows you to easily identify the page. You can quickly switch between tabbed pages just by clicking the thumbnail. Keep your browsing organized and productive by dragging thumbnails to change their position in the tab drawer, dragging links into the tab drawer to create new tabs, or even drag and drop tabs from one window to another. For those times when you have a lot of tabs in a single window, OmniWeb's tab drawer also features a list mode that lets you see a large number of tabs without having to scroll.

Workspaces
Imagine you have a lot of web pages open in your browser that you still have not viewed, but you need to restart your computer. You could bookmark all the pages and then load them all again when you next launched the browser, but that can take a lot of time and clutter up your bookmarks.

With OmniWeb's powerful new Workspaces feature, your individual browsing sessions can be saved in one convenient location. When you create a workspace, OmniWeb saves information like which web pages you have in your open in tabs, your history, and even the location of the windows on your screen. You can drag and drop the contents of one workspace to another to further organize them. Take a snapshot of a workspace and instantly restore the workspace from the snapshot, clearing away any changes made to the workspace in the meantime. Workspace files can also be emailed to other OmniWeb 5 users allowing you to easily share many websites with others using a single file.

Site Preferences
A powerful tool for customizing your browsing. Site Preferences allows you to set preferences on a per-site basis, so you can view different web sites in different ways.

On each individual domain you can choose how to interact with the content - change the text size, tell OmniWeb where to save downloads for a particular site, even specify which sites you would like to allow pop-up windows and advertising on. Browse all your sites the way you want to browse them. You're in control.

Powerful Bookmarks
Bookmarks in OmniWeb 5 have been thoroughly revamped. A new interface makes it easy to view and manage your favorite websites and adds several new features, making your bookmarks more powerful than ever.

Using Rendezvous, OmniWeb allows you to share your bookmarks, making your favorites accessible to other OmniWeb users on your local area network. Special bookmark 'Collections' offer several new features including a listing of all web servers available on your LAN and filtered views of bookmarks and history allowing you to easily see your most visited web sites or all the bookmarked pages that have been updated since you last visited them.

Also new to OmniWeb 5 are special 'News Feed' bookmarks for viewing XML/RSS feeds from many popular web sites right in OmniWeb's bookmarks. Now you can always be on top of the latest website headlines without having to use an external application.

Bookmarks and history are now easier to search, too, with a search field built into the bookmarks interface. You can sort them based on a number of available attributes making it easy to find just what you are looking for.

One of OmniWeb's most powerful features, Shortcuts, has been extended to bookmarks allowing you to specify a keyword for each bookmark. Then when you want to load that page, just type in the keyword and OmniWeb loads the bookmark for you.

Search Shortcuts
If you click in a search field on a site like Google or the Internet Movie Database, you can select an "Add Search" icon at the bottom of your browser window. This allows you to create a shortcut to easily search the site in the future without loading it first.

OmniWeb has always allowed you to save space on your toolbar by using the location field for shortcuts in addition to URLs, but for those who prefer it you can now put a separate Search Shortcut field in your toolbar where all your search shortcuts will be available from a drop down menu. Just choose your shortcut, then type your search word and you're on your way.

Page Marking
Page marking allows you to 'mark' a web page for fast access. If you mark a page while you're browsing, OmniWeb remembers it for you. When you want to go back or forward in your browsing session, you can instantly jump to your marked pages - no matter how many additional sites you have visited. With page marking, you can greatly increase your browsing efficiency by navigating through to the important pages you're viewing more quickly, and with more accuracy.

For complete details on the changes in 5.0 beta 3 please see the release notes
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/5/releasenotes/

System requirements:
• Mac OS X 10.2 or higher (client or server)

OmniWeb 5.0 beta 3 expires on April 1, 2004.

OmniWeb 5 final will sell for $29.95

Upgrades from previous versions will be $9.95.

Purchases of OmniWeb 4.5 dated December 2003 and later are eligible for a free upgrade to OmniWeb 5.

For more information, visit:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/5/

***

Multi-user Security

http://www.applelinks.com/pm/comments.php?id=829_0_1_0_M

From: Jere

"OTOH, with OS 9 you can put the machine to sleep with a keyboard shortcut - can't in OS X, which is a much bigger pain, IMHO"

Command-Option-Eject has always worked for me in Jaguar and Panther. I've never programmed this, there is no dialog or anything, the machine just sleeps.

"I wish there was a simple, one-time global command to completely disable multi-user security."

Set your only account to automatically log in at startup in the Accounts section of System Preferences. Although not really "disabling" multiple users, you shouldn't have to worry about "logging in" again.

For the record, I love the multiple users options of OS X. Of course though, I've struggled with At Ease and OS 9's poor implementations of this concept for years so OS X was a breath of fresh air for me in this regard. Helps me make sure my children don't muck things up accidentally.

___

Hi Jere;

If I had kids (or anybody else) sharing my computer, I would probably feel the same way. In our house, everybody has always pretty much had their own computer.

I have always had the automatic log in set since I started using OS X. The annoyances I was referring to were more in the line of being locked out of my own files when I'm accessing the computer over a network or booted in another user account (all "users" are me). I've tired to minimize this by changing permissions to "Read & Write" for any user on most folders, but it would be great if there was a single command for disabling multiple user security and password protection globally.

Charles




NotePad 2.0

http://www.applelinks.com/pm/comments.php?id=829_0_1_0_M

From Sumeth Chaochuti

Hi Charles,

I seem to have problem downloading the NotePad 2.0 mentioned above. I downloaded the file from:

http://lazee.lunasitelabs.com

Its name has a suffix .tgz and causes Expander to lock up. After force-quit Expander, expanded .dmg file could not be mounted. Any advice on this? Thanks.

Sumeth

___

Hi Sumeth;

That's odd. I downloaded it and had no problems. Could it have gotten corrupted in the download?

Charles



***



Charles W. Moore


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