gmail / general disappointment
 

Omni's products are generally incredibly high quality.

Omnigraffer is by far the best flowchart design software I ever came across.

Omnioutliner is perhaps not necessary but does what it's meant to really well without bloat (i.e. good software)

Omnidisksweeper - orgasmicly simple solution to a common problem. Elegant.

But Omniweb? I mean - come on! The site prefs are clever, neat, whatever. Workspaces, sure sure. But when gmail doesn't even work properly...? They're web developers, right? So how can they not know how common folk want to use the web?

Before deploying such a hyped-up application, and especially from such a professional developing team as omnigroup, run throgouh testing of the most common web apps.

Sorry for the bashing, but when everything else they produce is so excellent, such a bomb is simply upsetting.

[QUOTE=narcvs]But Omniweb? I mean - come on! The site prefs are clever, neat, whatever. Workspaces, sure sure. But when gmail doesn't even work properly...? They're web developers, right? So how can they not know how common folk want to use the web?

Before deploying such a hyped-up application, and especially from such a professional developing team as omnigroup, run throgouh testing of the most common web apps.

Sorry for the bashing, but when everything else they produce is so excellent, such a bomb is simply upsetting.[/QUOTE]

OmniWeb was deployed before the Google founders were out of college, long before Google was created and long before Gmail was envisioned. Most of the technologies that Gmail uses didn't even exist when OmniWeb was deployed.

There's been a lot of updates since its deployment. There's also a lot of quirks with Gmail which cause it to not work with with Apple's own Web Kit. Heck, I have yet to find a browser that works well with Gmail. IE7 & FF2 both have issues with Gmail.

Sure OmniWeb has more than some, but Google is continually releasing updates to Gmail, some of which don't work right in browsers. Gmail is still in beta, after all.

I assume you've searched the forum and mailing list to discover some of the reasons Gmail doesn't play well with OW, and some of the tweaks one can do to make it work better, right?

I also think here we cannot blame Omni much for the inconsistent way some browsers handle JavaScript. And especially the problem that Apple has completely failed to come up with a proper JavaScript engine for Safari and is finally catching up with their nightly builds.

It is only now that everyone does AJAX on their sites - some with less success than others - that JavaScript becomes more of an issue, especially when the developers don't test their JS against all major browsers. I partly blame Google for not yet fully supporting Safari, especially with Google's CEO being on Apple's board of directors, but as much I blame Apple for still not having implemented JS in a way that actually works, or at least not deploying some of the fruits of their nightly builds as a dearly needed update to the official WebKit.

Omni, ego te absolvo ;-)

That's pretty much it. Webkit development is still seriously lagging behind other major browser engines, and Omniweb is not a major revenue generator for Omnigroup. So, more than anything, it's simple economics that's keeping Omniweb development back. At least, my impression is that the factor of the revenue divided by the resources dedicated to the project is MUCH lower for OW than any other Ogroup product.

C'est la vie.

[QUOTE=philonous]Webkit development is still seriously lagging behind other major browser engines[/QUOTE]

Is it? In what way?

[QUOTE=jem]Is it? In what way?[/QUOTE]

Developer mindshare. Recent versions - the nightlies - are of extremely high quality, but we won't see that in production until Leopard. So right now a lot of people just ignore WebKit. "IE and FF are all that matter anyway", or so the (lazy, IMHO) logic goes.

But dig through the bugzilla for WebKit; there's Googlers in there fixing bugs, or at least aware of things and working with the WebKit people when it's server-side.

[QUOTE=neurobashing]Recent versions - the nightlies - are of extremely high quality, but we won't see that in production until Leopard. So right now a lot of people just ignore WebKit.[/QUOTE]

In the mean time... I've been trying Omniweb on Webkit nightlies and it runs a treat - Webkit with Keychain access, but without the superb web inspector I know.

Save an Automator 'Run Shell Script' as a new Application to launch it from your dock :)

export DYLD_FRAMEWORK_PATH=/Applications/WebKit.app/Contents/Resources/
open/Applications/OmniWeb.app

Ha! I boobed here - works for Shiira, but on downloading a Webkit nightly noticed OmniWeb wasn't changing the WK version, so it isn't actually picking it up. Oh the shame...

so, a couple things.

1 - here's the [url=http://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=GoogleBug&resolution=---]Open[/url] and [url=http://bugs.webkit.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=GoogleBug]Total[/url] google bugs in Webkit's bug database currently. Most, if not all, of these are gmail bugs.

2 - Splutter: that won't work, because we embed a slightly-customized copy of webkit in OmniWeb itself. This means 2 things: That you can't just drop a nightly in, and that we can have OmniWeb using a newer version of webkit than the one on the system.

Hope that helps a bit.

[QUOTE=Rachael]Hope that helps a bit.[/QUOTE]

Thanks Rachel, looking forward to the next OW as (in this instance) latest webkit is working pretty well with GMail/Blogger/WordPress etc.

Hmm... Well, I stand corrected. Nevertheless, this has turned into a bit of a semantic argument: even if webkit is more compliant, can the rest of the world be really wrong? When FF and IE and Safari work better, what recourse does the user have? "When in Rome..." the saying goes.

I will try one of the webkit nightlies. Still, it would be so nice to have OW 5.6, pretty PPLLLLLLLEEEEEAAAASSSEEEEE!!!