OWB 2.18

New release, here the changelog:

History:
2.18 (7.12.2008)
- Seems I finally found the missing bits to get usable text rendering,
especially with the core fonts, and changed the default fonts back to
the core fonts. The defaults for the FONTXDPI and FONTYDPI tooltypes
are 84 now, if you are using these tooltypes you have to adjust them.
- Fixed some bugs on ACID3.
- Added rendering optimisations from another OWB port.
- When scrolling with the mouse wheel or window scroll bars it now
immediate renders the new parts. It's slower that way, but avoids the
stripes.
- Added GETTITLE ARexx command.

You can find it on OS4Depot, upload section

@samo79

Tnx for info...Just try it..Works OK..but is hungr for memory and that is not good for me :D have only 256mb on my micro :(

@samo79

Using OWB 2.18 right now. Working very well so far.

Like VooDoo, I have a MicroA1 with 256 MB RAM.

BTW, OWB 2.17 was working so well, I forgot it had no download feature

---
redfox

Thanks for update.

@ll: buy some more memory :)

@Kicko

Why you dont buy to me? for small Xmas gift :P

Is it faster now? It takes 8 seconds before the amigans.net page shows after clicking on the OWB icon.. seems faster.

@jahc

Here on my sam is very fast... impressive

Quote:
Great, my homepage now again looks like it used to. Thanks and good job, J?rg!


Best regards,

Niels

BTW, is anybody seeing this apart from me? Sometimes (like right now), when I go to Amigaworld.net, the topic list on the main page has all the little icons showing as question mark icons (presumably because they couldn't be loaded?), and when I click on one of the topics, I get a message on a blank page saying:

Quote:

Using IBrowse instead in such a case works normal.

It seems like a problem at the server, but why do OWB and IBrowse behave differently when that problem occurs?

PS: It is not a new problem with 2.18, I have seen it a few times previously.


Best regards,

Niels

@samo79

Thanks for the news.

@joerg

This version doen't seem to participate in the mysterious python crashes (along with cygnix). What did change since 2.17? Any changes in networking code? (there are some suspicions that bsdsocket.library is somehow related). Neanwhile gone to reboot to see if the condition remains...

Huge thanks!

Edit: it was burst of premature optimism on my part. Something prevented python crashes. So investigation will resume. Me goes to sleep,

Hmm, the font rendering seems to be all over the shop for me.. the old kerning bug is back. I even installed the core fonts, and its still not right.

I'm going to try with XDPI and YDPI set to 80 again...

Edit: No, the kerning is still all wrong and the fonts are now too small. I'll just leave it on the defaults.

@VooDoo & Redfox
OMG, buy at least 512MB....


@thread
Best release so far imho.

How to use Bookmarks?? It always complains about reqtools library but i have it in Libs:

@ikir

Download the newest OWBAddressBook (v. 3.2) from OS4 Depot. It does not use reqtools anymore.

@redfox

yes missing the download/upload options.

will owb be avaible to use flash on the loong run.
youtube and stuf like that. news stastions use it all the time..

hmm
about facebook. i cant write in all box?s funny becuse it works in some

@PEB

Thanks, it work ok now.

I had a play with this version, and it's incredible! It is such a huge leap forward, the speed of it is unbelievable, scrolling is fast and smooth both on Sam440 and uA1, and pages load quick. It's amazing to see that browsing modern webpages can be done at such speeds on hardware of this class like what we have now and it really shows what the Amiga is about. To sum it up:

THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR JOERG, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR THE AMIGA...

Apart from speed, there are also a number of bugs gone, such as the loading of the amigans.net webpage, which on my Sam440 (strangely not on my A1) always appered with the left menubar much too wide, and a question mark shown instead of the PayPal donate button, this happened on all OWB versions from 1.x all the way up to 2.17, but it's gone with 2.18.

I can confirm that the font rendering in this version is not particularly accurate, the gap between the characters is not very even and varies throught the words, even if I type the same caracter many times, the distance between them varies from character to character (just try typing lots of period characters (e.g. .............) in amigans.net when posting here and you'll see what I mean).

GIF anims are still not working, but the strange thing is that when I scroll a page so that the area where a gif anim is has to be redrawn, I can see the frames of the gif anim cycle, so the only issue is that there is no timer-based trigger which makes that part of the webpage periodically refresh.

Apart from that, some important features are still missing, the most important of which for me are:
- file download (hopefully one that can handle simultaneous downloads like IBrowse)
- context menu when clicking right-mouse-button on a URL or image with options like 'Save Target As...', 'Copy URL to clipboard', 'Save Image As...'
- URL history with automatic URL completion when typing in the URL

I already donated for OWB, but I will do it again because this is a project that is definitely worth supporting, and I encourage everyone else to do the same.

@samo79

it's a amazing fast

@xeron

Quote:Kerning is intentionally disabled, for example in input fields OWB doesn't use it correctly and for example if you type 'AVAVAVAVAVAVAVA' there the cursor would be way too much to the right if I enable it.

Quote:If you want to make the fonts larger you have to increase the DPI values, not decease them.

Getting identical results to libfreetype with the AmigaOS font engine is impossible anyway (at least unless I'd create matching .otag files everyone would have to use instead of the settings you pefer), and as long as there are still people using FFS using libfreetype is no option either, if FONTS:_TrueType is on a FFS partition libfreetype is unusable slow.
Additionally the kerning problems in OWB are in other parts and input fields are unusable with libfreetype as well, I'd have to disable kerning in OWB's FreeType font implementation too.

@COBRA

Quote:IMHO it's much better than in all older versions.

Quote:The glyph widths are floats but since rendering has to be done with integer pixel offsets there is no way to fix something like that (at least not without using sub-pixel rendering, and since the the support for it in the OS4 font engine had to be disabled for patent reasons I couldn't implement it myself for the same reason either).

Quote:They are currently broken in OWB (all platforms, it's not a bug in the AmigaOS 4.x parts).