[Handycam]

When the OmniGroup program-wizards create a variety of preferences (or AppleScript install applications to swap out icon sets) then all users can tune this lovely app to what we need.

FWIW, you can access all the icons at Contents>Resources. In fact, I've been swapping the old default icons for Jon Hicks' icons for years.

[cleverdevil]

Originally Posted by Handycam

FWIW, you can access all the icons at Contents>Resources. In fact, I've been swapping the old default icons for Jon Hicks' icons for years.

I have been doing the same. I just downloaded my first 5.7 sneakypeek, and I was pleased to see the new icons. They are considerably better than the old ones, although still not as good as Jon Hicks'.

Have the OmniGroup folks taken a look at Jon Hicks' icons? They are a bit closer to the Leopard style. I would actually like to see some icons that basically match those found in the Leopard Finder toolbar. It would give OmniWeb a much more seamless look.

That, and the bookmarks bar is a stark white in comparison to the new Leopard grey-ish window style. This is a bit off-putting, but I have no suggestions on what might look better.

[Jon Hicks]

My previous icon sets look a bit dated now, Leopard has brought with it very particular button styles and they don't quite fit in. However I would point to Coda as good example of a mac application that gets it without looking too much like Safari.

[Bill Van Hecke]

Hi folks,

I just added a new revision of the icons, pretty greatly adjusted based on feedback from you guys and from around Omni. Thanks, and keep the feedback coming! There's still a lot of room for improvement, I think.

[andreas_g]

the new icons look much better now. but still i don't really like them. i think they should be more "shiny" an should have a more OS X like look (transparent looking elements/colors etc like they were made of glass).
for now they still remind me a little bit of Win XP, which is not a good thing. maybe there is a way to improve this, and still be leopard friendly.
(i can't test on leopard, still using 10.4)

[philonous]

Originally Posted by cleverdevil

That, and the bookmarks bar is a stark white in comparison to the new Leopard grey-ish window style. This is a bit off-putting, but I have no suggestions on what might look better.

Stark? Hmmm.... Perhaps OG could convince Philippe Starck to design the new icon set. That's the only thing that's missing from his portfolio: browser icons. Think about it. That's an important thing to have in your design portfolio these days.

He's designing another restaurant in LA, just down the street from me actually. Now that I think about it, his designs are not exactly affordable. So, maybe the icons alone would make for a paid upgrade to OW....

One thing is for sure. Strack's web site is decidedly unimpressive.

P

[Jon Hicks]

These are looking better - the white highlights help them look crisper, but they still feel like the wrong direction. The History icon looks 'quilted' rather than being a flat calendar, as does the bookmarks icon.

However looking at the UI's for other Omni applications, OmniFocus and OmniPlan in particular, Omniweb still feels left behind. You almost wouldn't know it's been made by the same people. Those apps feel aesthetically up-to-date (talking UI as well as icons now) and I would love, LOVE, Omniweb to take that direction too. I'm at the point where it's only aesthetics that prevent me using OW full time.

[Stormchild]

Originally Posted by Jon Hicks

I'm at the point where it's only aesthetics that prevent me using OW full time.

Although I would agree that the toolbar icons and UI in general need a refresh, for me there are more significant and compelling reasons why I can't get away from OmniWeb as my main browser.

I find Firefox to be hideously slow to start up, and it just lags behind Webkit in general performance. I only use it when I have to (which is sadly still the case, as there are still a few websites that just don't work properly in Webkit browsers).

There are a lot of reasons why I still prefer OmniWeb over Safari, and I don't think Safari will ever have most of these features; they just don't fit in with Apple's vision of an extremely simple and straightforward browser for the masses. I want something a lot more advanced, and despite its shortcomings, only OmniWeb fits the bill.

The per-site preferences are absolutely essential. Sometimes a particular site's text is too small, and I not only want to increase it, I also want it to remember that, so I don't have to adjust it again next time. And obviously I don't want the text size of every other site to increase too (why would anyone want it to do that? And yet that's what every other browser does).

I also visit Japanese websites, many of which are still using old encoding schemes like Shift-JIS, and display a bunch of garbage instead of proper text when viewed as Unicode. Granted, it's the fault of those sites for not properly declaring their encoding type, but it's a whole lot easier for me to just change the encoding on my end than to contact the webmaster at every one of these sites, inform them of the problem and wait for them to (maybe) fix it. Again, changing the global text encoding is not what I'd want to do, so per-site preferences win again.

Being able to load custom CSS rules for each site is a blessing too. You can remove ads, change ugly colors or poor choice of fonts, etc.

I could actually go on and on about per-site preferences without even mentioning anything else, and that would be enough reason never to use any other browser (unless I'm forced to as in certain cases).

Another big one for me is bookmark separators. I find these to be essential for organizing bookmarks without forcing me to stuff bookmarks in nested folders, which often end up less convenient than just typing the URL manually, defeating the purpose of having a bookmark. I can't imagine why Safari still doesn't have these in version 3.

There are, however, a couple of features I wish OmniWeb would (successfully) steal from Safari. One is the new WebClip feature, which makes Dashboard widgets. Not a big deal, I can just open up Safari and do this. Another one is automatic filling of forms. Yes, I know OmniWeb has it, but it has simply never worked anywhere near as well as it does in Safari (or even in Internet Explorer 5, back in the day). I don't know what's wrong with it, but it needs work.

Safari's toolbar buttons are a hell of a lot better though! I wish they would fire whatever idiot came up with those obnoxious toolbar icons in the new Leopard version of Preview. They seem to be following in the footsteps of Mail, but oddly enough I don't mind the ones in Mail at all. I think they look great actually. But the new ones in Preview are hideous and extremely wasteful of space. Compared to those, the OW toolbar buttons are not so bad. But that's like telling a woman she's "not that fat compared to an elephant". Not much of a compliment.

Anyway, my point is, although OmniWeb needs some work on its UI, for so many much-more-important reasons, I would never want to use anything else in its place.

[Schlaefer]

Something is fishy with the Tabs icon from the beginning, but I'm not shure what. How's about that:

[owuser]

What about the idea of adding a menu item in the 'Appearance' section of OmniWeb's Preferences that gives the user a few choices of icon sets? The user could select a theme, be informed that changes won't happen until the browser is restarted (if required), then after doing so be presented with a new set of icons that could be more to their liking. Off the top of my head, for example, there could be 'Classic', 'Professional', 'Safari-Like', and 'Colorful'. Most other browsers have multiple themes, at least the mainstream ones anyway, and giving the users a few choices would be a great way of pleasing a larger group of people.

I understand something like that might be too big of a project to implement in a 5.x release, still it might be something to start thinking about for Omniweb 6.

Thoughts?