Ken Case: We were extending OmniWeb's current HTML engine when Apple announced their plans for Safari, but now we're taking a hard look at their work on KHTML to see whether that might be a good solution for OmniWeb.
We'd looked at Gecko in the past, and portions of it--like the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine--are currently used in OmniWeb. But the design goals for Gecko as a whole didn't really mesh very well with OmniWeb: it's a least-common-denominator operating system solution, while OmniWeb tries to make the most of our underlying operating system.
We've just released OmniWeb 4.2 beta 1 this week, and (in addition to a number of other enhancements and bug fixes) it includes a 'Zoomed Editor' for entering large amounts of text into forms--it lets you enter the text in a separate window that you can resize to see as much or as little of text as you'd like. But 4.2 doesn't include a new rendering engine yet, so that remains our biggest weakness at the moment.
For OmniWeb 5.0, we do plan to provide a solution for simultaneously browsing multiple pages in the same window, and we're working on some new browsing innovations. But first things first: before improving our award-winning interface even more, we've really got to fix our rendering engine.
5. A problem I have personally experienced with all the OSX browsers on my G4 is that scrolling and especially resizing web pages on OSX can be slow and jerky (as opposed to smooth OS9). Why does this happen? What are the purely technical reasons that make scrolling quick and smooth on other platforms but are a problem on OSX for many users?
Ken Case: I think that the big limitations here are that Mac OS X's Quartz interface is currently software based (since no hardware exists which supports things like rendering nice antialiased text), and that the PowerPC chipset doesn't have a direct equivalent to the Pentium's write-combining mode for video memory regions. If we could render in hardware (as today's 3D games do), we wouldn't need fast write access to random chunks of video memory; if we had fast non-sequential write access to video memory, we could probably get away with so much of the rendering happening in software (as OpenStep/Intel did). But with that combination, I think we're limited by the number of pixels we can push through the hardware whenever we scroll or resize a window.
6. Despite Apple's Switch campaign, all the recent survey's I've seen agree that Apple has reduced its market share from 5% a few years ago, down to 2.3%-2.5% today. Is OmniGroup thinking of porting or rewriting their applications to other platforms? Is Windows or Linux on any porting plans or you will stay faithful to the Mac platform?
Ken Case: All of our products are designed specifically for Mac OS X: we love the combination of Aqua and Cocoa and UNIX, and we don't have any plans to port any of our software to any other platforms.
7. Do you think that Apple would make the big jump to AMD Opteron or to plain x86? Do you see something like this happening, does it make sense for Apple and maybe your business?
Ken Case: As you may know, NeXT supported four CPU architecture families: Motorola 680x0s, Intel 80x86s, HP PA-RISCs, and Sun SPARCs. I'm sure that Apple is keeping their options open, and will introduce support for another CPU architecture when the time is right.
For this to happen, of course, they need to wean people away from (the unportable) Mac OS 9. Since they've just introduced hardware which requires Mac OS X, I think they're one step closer to the point where they can make such a move without backlash from the wider Macintosh community.
8. OmniGroup also ports games to the Mac platform. How is OpenGL performance on the Mac today? How easy is to port 3D games from the PC to the Mac when the latest PC game releases have crazy hardware requirements even for PC standards, while most Mac users still run on Macs with slower graphics adapters and less overall speed than some brand new PCs? If this is not exactly an issue yet, do you believe that porting a "high end" 3D game from the PC in a year from now would be quite a challenge to optimize it in a way that it would run adequately to the Mac?
Ken Case: We have some great graphics cards on the Macintosh now, and potential OpenGL performance has improved quite a bit with the release of Mac OS X 10.2. But we're still working under the handicap of relatively slow CPUs and memory access, so until that situation changes it will always be a challenge to make games perform well.
(As for running the latest games on older hardware: well, you can't really do that on the PC side either--in fact, that's pretty much the only reason I occasionally buy a new PC. So yes, it's a problem, but it's not one which is unique to the Macintosh.)
9. How OmniGraffle 2.x and OmniOutliner 2.x have been selling? I read that in 2001 the company was not profitable. How was 2002? Easier or rougher?
Ken Case: We've made a pretty huge transition in our business over the last two years, from making 90% of our revenue from consulting to making 90% of our revenue from our commercial software products, and our boxed software first appeared on shelves at CompUSA and The Apple Store within the last few months. We're very happy with the success of our products (the last half of 2002 was definitely much easier than the first half), but it's still a little early to judge how well they will succeed (especially in the retail market), and we still have a lot of work ahead of us.
10. Is OmniGroup working on any brand new applications for OSX or you are working on updating the existing ones?
Ken Case: Our first obligation is to our existing customers, so over the next few months our engineering effort is focused on major updates to our current titles--but once we've done that, we certainly do have some new applications planned!
- "Ken Case Interview, Part I"
- "Ken Case Interview, Part II"
