Alternate File Browsing!

iPenguin

Hey, Look!
This is more of an OmniWeb trick but it's still pretty cool.

If you don't like the Finder you can just drag the folder that you want to browse onto an Omniweb browser window, and tada! an instant list of everything in that folder, even hidden files! From there you can go down through the folders, press back to go back, and even view pictures right there in the browser window! Unfortunately you can't open applications from there (it tries to download them...)

This doesn't work in Explorer, so I guess that it proves once again that, OmniWeb is by far a better browser!:D
 
I just relized that it trys to download classic apps, and shows you the contents of cocoa apps! that useful if you enjoy hacking your programs!:)

also you can go foward with the forward button!

You can see the path to the folder with the little arrow in the location bar!

The features are endless!!!!!!!!:D
 
I probably won't ever use it either but OmniWeb does give you a lot more options of things to do with folders. If you control click you get many options of things to do.

You can even bookmark the directory that you're in!

I guess that this feature in OmniWeb is useful if the finder isn't full featured enough for you.
 
Try typing file:// into any browser worth it's metal. Only the really mickey mouse ones will choke on this, and file:// has been around since Netscape 2.0 days.
 
This actually does work in IE, but it does not seem to do the drag and drop part. If you type file://localhost/ into the Address bar, you'll get tot he same place. Certainly this is not a nice looking as OmniWeb.

One possibly malicious feature of this is that JavaScript can detect what browser you are on and based on that grab certain files (i.e. Apache's http.conf or root's keychain file) and place them in hidden form fields to be uploaded back to the site...

(Looking around for vulnuralbe stuff I found this: Zip Codes and Flowers What the heck do we need these for?)
 
There's a ton of reference-type stuff in most *nixes. Somebody once thought it'd be a good idea to have it, so it's there. Varous apps might use them for something.

Try dropping a folder on BBEdit's icon, and also in a BBEdit document window.
 
Does anyone remember the old artcles on how Netscape could kill Windows, it was in my opinion a brilliant idea. Like you are finding with omni web Netscape 2.0, you could browse directories, view images, launch apps all through mime. I think that would have been amazing feet if Netscape had followed through, oh for the good old days when Netscape was great and aol didn't co-own the world with Microshaft. Instead Microsoft turned thier built in file system to show web pages, so to some point the fact that if they take out explorer it will destroy windows sort of works, because I think they are using the explorer engine to do all the displaying of pages and images in thier windows.
 
Yeah, Internet Explorer on Windows is used to browse files and directories too. I can go from browsing c:\somewhere to http://www.apple.com in the same window. I hope more OS's go to this level of integration instead of drawing arbitrary lines between what's here and what's there.

-Rob
 
I don't like the way IE is used in Windows. I want the OS and the browser to be two seperate things. I want one dedicated tool for every application. (I also don't like all the extra features in the official ICQ-client for example- I use Fire instead.)
 
What gets me about Windoze is that it doesn't give you a choice whether to browse your HD with IE or with a native OS window, making everything painfully slow...
Then again, no-one on this forum actually needed me to tell them that windows is crap did they? :p
 
I think at bottom MS had the right idea: integrating the OS/Desktop with the Internet is the way to go, but in typical MS fashion they completely fucked up the execution of the idea. And, to be charitable, they were probably held back by the technology available to them at the time (was WebDAV around back then?)

Apple is going about it much better with iTools. When you install OSX you either put in an existing account or sign up for one. From that, Mail grabs the info it needs, Finder is able to mount your iDisk and so on.
 
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