What makes software awesome?

Awesome software anticipates your needs, and is ready to help you, but doesn’t necessarily advertise everything it can do using the equivalent of the <blink> tag.

OmniWeb, like almost everything from OmniGroup, is great software. (OmniOutliner is also fabulous, OmniFocus is something you must get, and OmniGraffle is just run-down-the-street-screaming-with-joy good! But that’s another story.) Unlike any other browser (to my knowledge) OmniWeb allows you to edit <textarea>s by opening a resizable sheet. This was before Safari allowed you to resize them, and before Mootools made it easy for developers to make their <textarea>s resizable. So is OmniWeb’s feature now passe? Nope! I just discovered, as I was editing my last post and needing to remove several characters from each of several lines, and not feeling like cutting and pasting it into TextMate, that OmniWeb has columnar selection! The feature was just sitting there quietly waiting until I needed it and thought to myself I wonder if this will work?, and it did! This, ladies and germs, is awesome.

If you’ve held off on buying OmniWeb because it costs money, and you feel that browsers want to be free, then you’re being merely penny-wise. OmniWeb has features that are worth paying money for.