OmniWeb 5.1

I really like most aspects of OmniWeb 5.1. It’s not metal. The rendering is good. The speed is good. It has the only implementation of tabbed browsing that I like. And, of course, there are lots of nifty features that go beyond what Safari can do.

But for a Pro browser, it has some rather odd limitations. First, why is it so hard to view source in an external editor? Unlike in iCab, you can’t just pick the external editor in the preferences. Unlike Safari, you can't use AppleScript to retrieve the source of the frontmost window. As far as I know, the best that can be done is:

tell application "OmniWeb"
    set theURL to the address of browser 1
    set theTitle to name of browser 1
end tell

set pipe to "bbedit --clean --pipe-title " & theTitle's quoted form & " --view-top"
do shell script "curl " & theURL's quoted form & "| " & pipe

This is usually OK, but it requires downloading the page again (slow), and it won’t always work when forms, cookies, etc. are involved.

Second, when anti-aliasing is off, OmniWeb can’t properly space text. It runs the letters together or puts too much space between them. Applications that use WebKit rather than WebCore get this right, as do Carbon browsers like iCab and IE.

Lastly, there’s no way to make the download manager remove entries immediately after they’re complete. I don’t like the window to be cluttered.

Six Apart Acquires LiveJournal

Mena Trott:

I believe that LiveJournal has, unfortunately, received a bum rap because many have considered the postings on LiveJournal to be trivial. It’s sort of like a vicious circle: Journalists make fun of webloggers saying that they only post about their cats, webloggers make fun of LiveJournalers saying that they only post about high school angst and LiveJournalers make fun of webloggers saying that they are SUV-driving yuppies who think they have something important to say (and I’m generalizing). The fact is, webloggers and LiveJournalers are in essence doing the same thing: they are posting their thoughts to people who are important to them.

Acquisition

Apple Sues Think Secret

John Gruber:

This suit is not about stemming the rampant speculation regarding these specific rumors in the remaining days before the Expo. Cat’s out of the bag, the train has left the station, don’t cry over spilled milk, etc.

Apple wants two things here. First, they want the identities of Think Secret’s sources.…the second thing Apple wants: to discourage future leaks. They’ll do this by pursuing legal recourse against the leakers in public view, making it clear that loose lips sink careers.