OmniWeb beta gripes

[danasutton@mac.com]

Dear production team:

I think you guys have a lot of things implemented very well, the current sneaky peek beta of 5.5 (17) is stable, and man, is it fast!! But there remain a few little niggles, minor things but quite irritating. I'll mention three.

1.) This version only launches if it is kept on the desktop or in the Computer>Applications folder. If placed in the Computer>User>Home>Applications file, or in a subfolder thereof, it refuses to launch. Which, unfortunately, is exactly where I want to keep it (since I use ChronoSynch to automatically back up my Home folder to my external h. d. daily, and want OmniWeb to be included in the package).

2. Every time I open a new window, it insists on opening on the left side of my screen, and since I have a rather large monitor, I have to drag the window to center it. Then I close it, open another window. Same thing. Gets to be a real time-wasting nuisance. I want OmniWeb to be able to remember where I located my last window and open the new one in the same place. The current situation is bad ergonomics.

3. I've always hated the way AutoFill is implemented on OmniWeb, where you get a drop-down list of options for each item. The Safari way, where it grabs info from your Address Book and fills out each blank in a whole page at once, is MUCH nicer. Bad ergonomics, again.

In fact, these little niggles, plus probably many others I haven't noticed yet, make me wonder if you ought to hire a guy for your development team whose job would be to serve as a kind of ergonomics ombudsman, who would spot these little problems and hammer the rest of the team until they got them right. God, as they say, is in the details.

[climbingtractor]

1. Works fine for me from my User Applications folder. Not sure why it wouldn't work for you.

2. Position the window where you want it and then select the Window > Save Window Size item. New windows will always appear in that position.

Mike

[JKT]

1. is not a typical user experience - certainly something not quite right on your system there.

2. An odd interface quirk. Not sure what the thinking was behind that decision to make people save window sizes but once you know it, it works.

3. I like the drop down menus, but that isn't autofill, that is autocomplete (and Safari's implementation of the autocomplete feature is diabolical, fwiw). Autofilling should be a matter of clicking the autofill button in the toolbar or selecting it from the view menu (or pressing the shortcut), but it has never worked very well for me. In fact, Autofill has always been quite badly implemented in OmniWeb and it is something I'd like to see fixed in OmniWeb 6. Adopting Safari's implementation for Autofill would certainly be the way forward, just so long as OmniGroup keep well away from Safari's autocomplete ;)

[Forrest]

2. I vastly prefer the way it is. It's extremely annoying when a browser thinks just because the last window was positioned on one part of the screen, I want the next one to be there too.