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Apple Businesses

Interview with Ken Case, CEO At Omni Group 57

Posted by Hemos from the talking-head-report dept.
Gentu writes "Omni Group, makers of OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and other OSX products, talked to OSNews via its CEO, Ken Case. The interview talks about the company and its products, Apple's strategies, Safari, NeXT and the future. Case believes that Safari does not pose a threat to the OmniWeb market-share."
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Interview with Ken Case, CEO At Omni Group More

Interview with Ken Case, CEO At Omni Group

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  • uber elite hackers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nocomment ( 239368 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @08:38PM (#5228004) Homepage Journal
    Those guys at omni are uber elite hackers. Been programming OSX since it was NeXT. They're the ones who ported Quake II to Mac in a week! Impressive group of coders right there. Omniweb is an excellent browser as well. If I'm not mistaken it's the old browser from the NeXT systems.

    • Re:uber elite hackers (Score:5, Informative)

      by cbv ( 221379 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @09:35PM (#5228262) Homepage
      If I'm not mistaken it's the old browser from the NeXT systems.

      The oldest was called Nexus, also simply known as WorldWideWeb.app [w3.org] by Tim Berners-Lee. But OmniWeb is probably the oldest that survived.

    • Re:uber elite hackers (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Ponty ( 15710 )
      OmniWeb 2.0 and 3.0 are still popular NEXTSTEP and OpenStep browsers. I use 3.0 regularly on my Cube and Nitro.

      OmniWeb and Mail.app were two of the reasons I moved to a Mac in 2001 from using my NeXT full-time. I proudly bought OW a second time. Now, though, I have to admit, that I'm using Safari full time. It's the only browser I've seen that produces results that are as attractively presented as OmniWeb. When I was forced to use IE or a gecko-based browser instead of OW (usually for JavaScript reasons), I would blanch. They're almost unusably ugly after you become accustomed to the elegance and attractiveness of OW.
    • Yeah. Omni do good stuff, they are uber-cocoa, and all that. Omniweb is a good browser, despite the sometimes speed and java problems. Here's the thing--if Omni have been around so long, and know cocoa so well, and have been writing Omniweb for awhile, why is their freaking Omniweb development cycle so dog slow right now? Get the damn new Omniweb out the door already. That they ported Quake whatever in like a week is way cool.

  • OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    OmniWeb sucks.

    No tabbed browsing, very poor standards support (CSS, JavaScript).

    One thing about it absolutely rocks though: cookie handling.

    In OmniWeb you can specify if cookies are rejected, kept until end of session, kept indefinitely, or if omniweb should pop up a dialog asking what to do on each cookie.

    You set one of these as the default, and you can set any one of these options on individual domeains.

    Very simple. This allows me to set cookie handling normally on slashdot.org, paypal.com, etc., for auto-login; reject cookies from online ad sites; and accept cookies until end of session on all other sites.

    This gives me nice fine-grained control over cookies. How come no other browser does this? With most browsers it's all or none.

    Add in an option to reject cookies from sites other than the one in the location bar (to stop ads and third-party images from tracking me), and you'd have the perfect cookie control.

    I hope this kind of cookie control shows up in Safari.

    • Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Alan Partridge ( 516639 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @08:59PM (#5228117) Journal
      Omniweb DOES NOT suck. You mentioned the excellent cookie handling (agreed), but forget the incredible page rendering quality, awesome bookmarking system (providing constant feedback on redirected, updated and broken links), excellent window handling (fuck tabs - give me open behind and save window size ANY day), superb form filling (excellent rendering with aspell supported properly and now, zoomed text boxes too).

      Omniweb loses out on IE and CSS support, I agree - but MY online banking still prefers it to any other browser, and Safari's timeouts really do BORE me now.
    • I take exception to the idea that no other web browser does the cookie management similar to OmniWeb. iCab, also available for Mac OS X does exactly this.
      • --great browser. Best cookie control, best image control. It's my browser of choice on the mac. I will admit I've not tried omniweb though, but have tried all the other browsers on mac (classic) so far that I could find. Better than all of them, IMO. Apple should have sought those guys out for "howtos" on making safari, or just bought them. I see people going on and on about opera and chimera and konq and now safari, "small, fast" etc. Phooie, icab got small and fast down already. The developer is a mac loyalist as well, too bad he's not as appreciated as these other guys. That was the first thing I thought of when I read about safari, that it would take away from people trying iCab. Also the only modern GUI browser that is fully functional with any speed on the older 68k macs that I have own.

        • Re:iCab rocks (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Visigothe ( 3176 )
          The problem is that is *isn't* fully functional. If it were, it would render CSS 1 and 2 correctly. As it stands, iCab does a pretty poor job of CSS. The features of the browser are pretty cool though.
    • No tabbed browsing

      Tabbed browsing is a horrible idea anyway. It harkens to the Windows UI idea of having document windows within the program window. Each window is supposed to be a single document. Each page open in a separate window is a much better UI paradigm.

      The one thing I missed when I switched from iCab to OmniWeb was the fine-grained control over picture loading, although I believe they took that out of iCab in the more recent versions. You could block based on image pixel size, if the image server or path matched a wildcard expression (e.g. block all images that come from ads.* servers, or that have /ads/ in their path), or whether or not the image came from the same server as the page did.

      • Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You can do all this in OmniWeb. Preferences>Privacy>Voila! Ad control system.
        • Oh hey! I didn't notice that. Its still not as fine-grained as iCab was (no specifying pixel sizes - I like to block 1x1 images as well as ads, or blocking based on the path of the image instead of the server), but it'll do.

      • Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by moof1138 ( 215921 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @11:21PM (#5228737)
        You may not like tabbed browsing, and if not, all is well for you as you have more browsers to pick from, but tabbed browser windows are far from a horrible idea. In fact I think it is one of the few really great UI ideas I have seen in the browser world in a long time.

        Just because Windows started the MDI thing long ago does not make tabbed browsing awful. The fact is that Windows simply had a really horrible implemetation of MDI. Windows inside of windows - eeew. Tabs are intutive, easy to use, and most implementations are well though out. They improve performance, and help to organize content that otherwise can get out of control. I used to hate having tons of browser windows open, and having to cascade them just so, so that I could go back and forth between the slew of pages I need to have open at work - now I use Chimera and am much happier.

        I realize that folks have various issues with them, some contrived, some genuine, but they do solve a usability problem I have suffered under for years better than any other solution I have seen yet. If you do not like them, great for you, you need not use them. For me, I can't live without them, and I will never use a browser that does not support tabs unless something better comes along that solves the same problem as elegantly.
      • Tabbed browsing is a horrible idea anyway. It harkens to the Windows UI idea of having document windows within the program window. Each window is supposed to be a single document. Each page open in a separate window is a much better UI paradigm.

        So when you have 20 (or more) webpages open, as I frequently do, you would like to have 20 different windows? This is one of the worst UI nightmares I can imagine. I don't really care about which "paradigm" is better, I care what works better. Not everything has to be in its own window. Why do you think so many people LOVE tabbed browsing? Just because you don't like it doesn't make it 'a horrible idea' any more than having 30 open windows is a horrible idea (though that fact is nearly indisuptible).

        • Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Quick, identify which of the following tabs is for slashdot.org, which is for apple.com, and which is for sourceforge.net. To make this realistic, I have shortened the names to the length that you would normally see them in a browser such as Chimera.

          1) ...
          2) ...
          3) ...
          4) ...
          5) ...
          6) ...
          7) ...
          [and so on, all the way to]
          20) ...

          Ironically enough, where tabbed browsing would be most useful is where it becomes least practical to use.

          • well, slashdot has a little green "/.", sourceforge has an orange sphere, and apple is the one without an icon. at least here in mozilla-land.

            funny how the discussion of an interview can be morphed into another holy war (that's what tabbed browsing seems to be these days, imho)

          • In Galeon, once there is a full "row" of tabs (where you can see the *whole* title of each page) small left/right arrows appear at the rightmost side of the tabs. eg:
            [ slashdot ][ apple ][ more tabs]

            There isn't any reason this (or multi-row tabs?) couldn't be implemented in other browsers. I *love* tabbed browsing, personally :)
    • You forgot one thing: The internationalization on OmniWeb is the best I've ever seen. Not just the fact you can get the UI in a bunch of languages, but it handles international web pages very nicely.
    • It's not just the cookies!..
      Omniweb sucks in eaxctly 4 aspects: Javascript, DHTML, CSS and rendering speed (especially with tables!)
      EVERYTHING else simply rocks! It rocks so much i'm still using it as my primary browser in spite of all the flaws mentioned!
      Omniweb was the first browser i've seen in a loooong time that brought a *very* large number of really useful features that often make you think "why didn't anyone think of this earlier?"
      Here's a short list:

      1) Filtering of Linebreaks, Tabs and Spaces in the URL bar. Have an URL from an email or Webpage that spans several lines? No problem! Copy it, paste it into a new OW-Windows and press return! You might even opt for the even easier feature of services and just highlight it and press "shift-apple-u"!

      2) FULL Drag & Drop support. Yes, not even Apples own Safari can do the full thing! Try dragging an image onto Photoshop! ONLY OW can do that it seems! Most browsers don't even allow dragging of text into from-fields, which really pisses me off!

      3) Shortcuts. Once you got the hang of this, you wouldn't wanna miss it for anything! I've defined shortcuts for TheReg, Google, Google image, a german/english translator, versiontracker and i could prolly fix one for /. in a few seconds!
      Open new Window, enter "i eagle" and boom i get eagles from google image search! ;-) No scanning through bookmarks, no waiting till some frontpage loaded, no navigating till you found the "search" button! Simply great! Ah yes, Chimera now has this aswell in later builds!

      4) Contextual menues. Only OW (and now Chimera!) offer me *all* the options! If i have a linked image, i can choose to copy the image itself into the buffer, the image URL *or* the link on the image! I need all 3 often enough, so hooray for OW!

      5) Banner-filter. Yes, some other browsers have this, too, but OW just has it all

      6) Nice extra tools like a traffic monitor that shows you the process of the page being loaded in detail or an Error log that shows errors the webserver sends! Also very nice: the Page-info-window that shows you all the info on the linked file and even gives you thumbnails for every image

      7) a great source editor with highlighting and marking of open tags

      8) Great options that let you basically adjust every small behaviour!

      It's funny to see how all these features filter down onto other browsers like Chimera bit by bit! I'd say that means OW owns all the others! >:-)

      Hearing that Omni might base OW5 on Apples Webcore makes me jump in joy since that means all the letdowns mentioned above will be fixed and the good stuff is retained.

      I could never use Safari, it just doesn't offer what i need, and speed is only one thing among many for me that makes a browser interesting for me, as is compatibility!

  • market share (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zarqman ( 64555 )
    "Case believes that Safari does not pose a threat to the OmniWeb market-share."

    perhaps that's because they'd have to have some market share to lose some?

    seriously, i tried omniweb on recommendation. however, i found it seriously lacking. while it must have strengths (or it wouldn't garner a recommendation from anyone), it doesn't have tabs, nor does it render css. with those two shortfalls, especially the latter, it's pretty much unusable in my eyes.

    • Re:market share (Score:3, Informative)

      by Daleks ( 226923 )
      nor does it render css

      Yes it does. Your CSS rules just have to end with a semicolon, like this:
      .foo {
      margin: 10px;
      background-color: yellow;
      }
      The semicolon is optional, so says W3C, but the OW CSS parser is just malformed in that respect. OW is a very nice browser, but it's renderer and standards support need a lot of work, as Ken Case admits several times in the article. Hopefully they will use WebKit in OW5 and get all of that work done for free by Apple and concentrate on making a great interface.

      • Re:market share (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Twirlip of the Mists ( 615030 ) <twirlipofthemists@yahoo.com> on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @11:23PM (#5228757)
        Hopefully they will use WebKit in OW5 and get all of that work done for free by Apple and concentrate on making a great interface.

        I don't actually think you have to use the word "hopefully" here. Just a day or two after Safari and WebCore were released, Case announced that OmniGroup would be using the WebCore foundation for the next major release of OmniWeb. Whether he's talking about WebKit or some kind of home-grown wrapper around WebCore is unclear, but the gist of it is that OmniGroup won't have to screw around with HTML rendering or JavaScript execution any more.

        Case made the point really well in the very first interview question. He said that Safari is for people who use the default browser that comes with the OS, and that Apple is rightly trying to make that default browser as great as they can. OmniWeb, though, is aimed at people who aren't happy with the default browser. Two totally different points of focus.
    • Before Safari, I only used Omniweb (apart from banking sites and the like, for which IE was necessary). I even paid my $30 to support it. However, I haven't touched it since Safari came out, and I have no intention of going back. It's nice, but Safari has plenty more of an edge (speed and quality of render, interesting features) to keep me hooked.

      Sorry, Omni Group, but that's how it is.
      • No intention of going back? That's a little short sighted. Especially given that Omni are considering using the same KHTML rendering engine that Safari uses for the next version of OmniWeb.

        If that comes to pass then OmniWeb will have the speed and better CSS compatibility of Safari. Only Safari lacks many of the cool features of OmniWeb. OmniWeb really only lacks a tabbed browsing or similar interface feature but that omission is no different from Safari.

        You would be insane not to go back. In my opinion the Omni interface is better than Safari's but that is subjective. You can't argue with the wealth of useful features in OmniWeb however.

        The new thing in 4.2 beta 1 is to open text area boxes into a separate edit window (so you can better see your slashdot postings :P) Which is one of those things you don't realise how useful it is until you try it.

        Stick with Safari for the speed and the CSS compatibility since that is what is important to you, but keep an eye on where OmniWeb is from time to time. You might end up switching back.
        • pithhelmet strips out most adverts, pith gives me semi-tabbed browsing. It seems that Safari will be a lot better supported and is a lot more extensible than Omniweb. I love Safari's bookmark system, I'm particularly keen on the interface. Once you've enabled the debug menu, it has just about all of the features of Omniweb, and is fast and clean to boot.

          Of course I'll keep an eye on Omniweb (I downloaded the latest version when it came out this week), but I can't see it getting as good as Safari for me.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • "Case believes that Safari does not pose a threat to the OmniWeb market-share..."

      ...because both users already told Case that they don't plan on switching.

      :-) Sorry, I couldn't resist. Actually, I do use Omniweb and I like it very much.

    • One feature that Omniweb seems to have to itself is the ability to edit the HTML source of pages that you view and then redisplay the pages as edited -- without leaving the browser or the page. This is useful for getting rid of background images or color schemes that make some pages unreadable. It's also good for testing CGI forms, since you can quickly manipulate hidden inputs, etc.

    • You should note that Omni likes tabbed browsing and they're doing work on it:

      I really like the tabbed browsing feature found in Netscape 7/Chimera Navigator/Mozilla. Do you have any plans to add this feature to OmniWeb?

      We feel the functionality that tabbed browsing provides is very useful and we do plan to add something similar to OmniWeb with version 5.0. Entry last updated on June 24, 2002

      source: OmniWeb Support + Help Page [omnigroup.com]

  • Cookies, Toolbar, and it was just so damn pretty!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KrazyFool ( 534528 ) on Wednesday February 05, 2003 @02:18AM (#5229649)

    As everyone else pointed out so well was cookie control.

    The toolbar, over looked by most, was a another huge factor for me wanted be able to have every pixel i can get for a web page. I loved how the link was in the toolbar too. Also on the toolbar, why was apple the first one to put the reload and stop button in one? I'm I the only person in the world that thinks that was just genius?!?! anywho...

    Back in the days of 3 browsers (ie, mozilla, omniweb) Omniweb won me over based on loading fast and looking so damn good but now the heat is on with Chimera, Phoenix (why? i don't know), Safari but I think if Onmiweb can take what made it and other browsers great I would gladly jump right back, and keep chimera on the side, we all know why ;)

  • Must we continually bash a respected developer? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Amiasian ( 157604 ) on Wednesday February 05, 2003 @11:29AM (#5231694)
    I am saddened by the total immaturity of people towards this Developer. The Omnigroup is probably one of the more innovative and clever of the OS X app writers. For all the nil points people point out about Omniweb, I can point out good ones. Of course, you get the ad filtering and pop up blocking. You get Shortcuts, which I'm surprised no one has mentioned. Want to search for an image on Google? Just define it in shortcuts as image@ ... and then the google search string. Now all you do is "image [query]" and boom, it's there. Speech recognition if you need it. Link extraction. The info panel for downloading individual page elements as well as being able to stop laggish elements from loading. A nice HTML editor which I was surprised by to see in a browser.
    Also, using the floating text input panel to write up this comment is "not too shabby". Alt dragging links is useful in some instances. Remembering window size, et al. I could go on and on. The thing is, for what I visit, Omniweb renders the sites excellently, at an acceptable speed and it filters out the garbage. What's to trash on this thing? And it's not as if the developer's going out and saying, "Ha ha ha! Look, fools, our browser doesn't support CSS ... love us." Nah, they admit it, and are working on solving their problems.
    Also, I think part of NeXT's problem was they alienated developers. Not good. And it's happening again.

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