OmniWeb post the second...

Omniweb has become essential to my "browsing experience" to put it in today's vernacular. Possibly it even suggests the idea of a book title: "The Spirituality of OmniWeb as Browsing Experience". The tabs have the additional duty of creating multiple "desktops" which can be interchanged as you need a new default desktop for your browsing. I love this. Then, there is the bookmark list which I finally read the HELP on and figured out. So I now have a slick list of bookmarks which incorporate the Safari bookmarks I brought into OmniWeb and the default list OmniWeb supplies. I got rid of all sorts of links I didn't want, and the result is much better. I will admit the people at Omniweb could take a look at the bookmark SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) over at Opera. But this has been a minor irritant, and I can see where some people might like the rather intricate way one could set up the bookmarks. The premier look and feel of OmniWeb accentuates the technical acuity. So far I have downloaded from various sites, ordered from various sites, and made a point to do everything with it that Firefox is "iffy" about. I can't find a single thing OmniWeb doesn't handle flawlessly. I did have a couple crashes of the software the other night when I was busy doing some "cross-window" cut and pasting, and I think I may have overgrossed it myself.

Books, books and more books

Another shipment of brain food arrived from Alibris the other day. It is getting so that I must remove some furniture from the den to make way for books. Unfortunately, I also have a problem because I now have over twenty books I have not read and they are sitting around here and there staring at me as I walk by. If I sit and watch television, I feel their sorrow. Earlier on in life I always had read what I had on the shelves, but now they burgeon out of bounds. The advent of the computer has eroded away my reading time, and although I have to count my ereading time, that is also another area in which to build a book collection of unread titles. The bright spot in all this is that for the next several decades I ought to have something to do.

Old-tech paper punches

WHY can't someone invent a reasonably priced, non-problematic 3-hole punch?! The one I have at home you have to literally jump up and come down on it with force and then you hurt. The one at work that cost four times as much has one punch that doesn't function all the time, though there is a twisty thing to regulate that...but it doesn't stay in place. Absurdly, I just exchanged a new paperpunch of medium price for another because one punch would go down but not come up. And three of the ones I tried of the same make and model also had that problem. I have come to the conclusion that the whole species "paper-punch" is flawed. The design has not changed in decades, maybe over five decades. Inventing genius, your time is NOW.

The perfect browser quest goes on...

Just as the "perfect email service" quest has wound itself around and about over the past decade or so, so goes the "perfect browser" quest. Let's just leave IE out of it entirely. The only sites I use it on are sites which are required in my work and which are sadly made to function only in IE. Netscape is out of the picture, as it is now a vortex for spyware, and another piece of bloat. I don't need the mail and the composer and the newsreader, etc., etc.

Moving right along, there is Firefox, which although a fast, sleek and really nice little non-bloaty browser, has a few little glitches, and doesn't do well on a few sites. It also has a rather temperamental download facility, and on the Mac version has actually lost the download yet kept on grinding I know not where. It does this only randomly though, and is not always a problem. I have written about Firefox before, and at the moment it is my browser of preference on both systems.

Opera 7 is also on both systems, and Opera is a dandy browser, fast and efficient. The screen real estate is the problem with Opera, and the quirky handling of all those toolbars gets interesting. I have used Opera since version 3.5, and I have been sorry to see the usable screen area shrink. But Opera cares about web standards, and money spent on a license is money well spent. Opera remains extremely secure, and trustworthy, and the download utility is the best of any browser. I use it almost as often as I use Firefox.

Now, last night I downloaded the very classy OmniWeb for Mac OS X (there is no windows version). Omniweb 5 is a beautiful creature to behold. From the beauty of the OS X "look" to the speed, tabs on the side and overall smooth browsing, this one is a keeper. I intend to write more on Omniweb. For now, the bit where you can bring up a text editing box in any web form is so so cool. And the spellcheck - well, it doesn't get much better than this. Obviously this program is worth paying for. Last night I wrote a piece of email in one webmail account. I just clicked the tiny x (a feature of Omniweb)in the lower right of the text form which has always been too small in that mailer, and up came the textediting document window, and I was able to revise and see the whole message, and as I typed in the document it automatically transferred into the actual form box on the site. OH MY, how absolutely cool that is.

Palm Zire thoughts...

If one had a Zire, one could take ebooks wherever. To be bibliographically armed would be nirvana. Doctor's offices, waiting for my tires, all these tasks made so much more pleasant by reading, yet not carrying a book. HHHmm....but there is the cost. Lately I have been cruising the PalmOne site, and a very nice site it is. I keep going back because of the appealing and informative blurbs and the eReader store, so finally I began to read about the hardware itself. The real downside is that I hate to have things that rely on my PC because it becomes a tangled web of service contracts, and the possibility of one or another hardware peripheral going is just old. Not that I have had trouble in the past with hardware, but you never know, and I like to travel light on the ether. When you get a digital camera, a 'Pod, a handheld or any one of the other goodies, you then need to concern yourself with compatibility, upgrades, etc., and in the event that one of the hardware items is outpacing the others, or becomes outdated you are faced with working that issue out. So I have held out this long on the Palm. After becoming addicted to the 'Pod, well, I know my weakness.