OmniWeb 1.0 gamma is available

[Christopher Penrose]

>From Ken Case:

"Major features of this release include artwork and online help."

Sorry, I am going to be grouchy. I don't think that some of this new
artwork is very effective.

Anyway, I find that the icons representing Bookmarks are not as
effective as those found in recent releases.  Though the use of the
plus and minus operators convey the functionality of the bookmark
buttons on a bookmark browser, they do not do so as effectively as the
old text.  The program will be more difficult to divine for a
beginner.

Also, the new icons complete eliminate the metaphor of the bookmark,
by emphasizing the arrow rather than the archetypical bookmark loop.
Though the arrow is in itself an interesting metaphor of document
traversal, I think the look and feel of the older artwork was much
more effective.  The older artwork also looked much better in
grayscale than does the new.

I have been spending a great deal of time recently talking with my
friend Michele, a Communications graduate student, about interface
design.  She is writing about it infact.  Hence, all of this is on my
mind too.

Despite my perceptions of most of the new artwork, I like the new
shadowed arrows that act as links in the bookmark browser.  If you
folks are adamant about the plus and minus operators in your artwork,
you should consider shadowing them also such that they don't look so
stiff, stark and mechanical.  If it were up to me though, I would use
the more warm and evocative book imagery that you had discovered
before.  It was much better.

The new homepage is not as comprehensive.  It eliminates all the
useful references to NeXTstep material, and instead adds a great deal
of Lighthouse design advertising.  Though the new page is a little
more didactic, and hence good for a web beginner, I still want to
replace this page with the old.  Especially since I will have to
sacrifice useful information for nagging advertising.

Christopher Penrose
penrose at ucsd.edu