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Using Workspaces
Workspaces in OmniWeb complement tabs to provide you with another level of organizational control, while further reducing window clutter. Workspaces allow you to have many different sets of OmniWeb browser windows that are kept segregated from each other. At any one time you only see the browser windows that belong to your current workspace. Windows in other workspaces are hidden away, reducing window clutter and allowing you to focus on the task or topic at hand.
For example, you might set up a banking workspace that you activate any time you'd like to work with your online banking web sites. You might have another workspace specifically for doing research online, and perhaps one that contains all of your favorite news sites.
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The Workspaces window
Auto-save Your Browsing
Workspaces in OmniWeb do much, much more than simply keeping different browsing activities separated, however. They also give you the ability to have OmniWeb automatically save your browser state, and restore it the next time you open the browser. Each workspace has an Auto-save while browsing setting and when it is enabled, OmniWeb will remember nearly everything about that workspace, and will restore it then next time that workspace is activated, even if you quit the browser in the meantime.
Never again do you have to be worried about losing everything you have open in your browser in order to restart your machine after installing the latest Mac OS X update from Apple. In the rare case that OmniWeb crashes, you can breathe easy knowing that when you relaunch, everything will be just as you left it.
When a workspace has the Auto-save setting enabled, the following information is stored as part of the workspace:
- All of your open browser windows in the workspace, including all open tabs.
- The position, size, and toolbar configuration of all windows, including the status bar visibility.
- The minimized state of open windows.
- Your active window, active tab in each window, tab order, and window order.
- The size and view mode of the tab drawer for each window.
- The history for each tab in each window.
- Any form values entered into loaded pages.
- The scroll position of each page open in the workspace.
Note that currently the actual web page data is not saved. Workspaces store the address or URL for the pages loaded into each tab, but not the actual pages themselves. Web pages are re-fetched each time the workspace is loaded, either from the internet or from the regular disk cache.
When you launch OmniWeb for the first time you are using the Default workspace. This workspace does not have the Auto-save setting enabled so it behaves like most other web browsers, forgetting your open windows and tabs when you quit.
The Auto-save setting is enabled by default on all new workspaces, and can be turned on for the Default workspace by using the Workspaces window.
It is important to remember that everything OmniWeb saves about a workspace will override any preferences you have set. Consider the following scenario:
Your preference is to have the tab drawer open on the right hand side of the browser window. You create a new window in a workspace that saves windows, and the tab drawer opens on the right hand side as per your preference setting. Later, you change your preference so that tab drawers open on the left hand side of the browser window. When you later restore the workspace where you created the window with the tab drawer on the right, it will be restored on the right hand side, overriding your preference to have the drawer open on the left.
Snapshots
Workspaces can also have snapshots. A snapshot is like a picture of the workspace that you can restore at any time, rewinding the workspace to the state it was in when the snapshot was taken.
This can be very useful in many situations. Consider the following scenario:
Each day over your morning cup of coffee you load a number of different news sites, creating new tabs or windows for each article that you wish to read. This type of activity is perfect for a workspace that contains all of those sites, allowing you to concentrate on that one activity. By the time you have read through all of the sites, you might have a number of new windows or tabs open that you'll no longer need the following day. What you really want is the ability to easily return that workspace to the same state it was in when you first started - with only the home pages for the news sites loaded. Enter snapshots.
When you set up your news sites workspace, load each of the pages you want to start with. Once you have the workspace set up as you like, take a snapshot of the workspace. Now the pristine starting point is saved away, and you can easily return to it the next day by restoring the snapshot, eliminating all of the tabs and windows that you created in the process of reading the sites the previous day.
Snapshots and saved windows are completely independent of one another. You can store a snapshot for a workspace that does not save windows and vice-versa. When a workspace is opened and there aren't any saved windows, the snapshot for the workspace is automatically restored.
Workspaces with snapshots have a camera icon next to their name in the Workspaces window. To remove a snapshot from a workspace, close all open browser windows and then take a snapshot of the empty workspace.
Managing Workspaces
The menu in OmniWeb contains commands for working with workspaces as well as a listing of all available workspaces. Choosing a workspace from the menu activates that workspace and deactivates the current one. Workspaces are listed alphabetically in the menu, and are assigned a keyboard shortcut where possible from through . For more information on the individual menu items please see the Menu Reference.
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The New Workspace panel
The Workspaces window can be opened by choosing from the menu. This window is used to inspect and manage your workspaces, and also allows you to switch between workspaces.
The Workspaces window
Using the Workspace window you can:
- Add new workspaces and delete existing ones.
- Toggle the Auto-save while browsing setting for each workspace.
- Switch workspaces by double clicking on the workspace you wish to switch to.
- Edit workspace names by single-clicking on the name of a selected workspace, or option-clicking the name of any workspace.
- Inspect workspace contents. When a workspace is selected on the left, the windows and tabs in the workspace are displayed on the right.
- Move windows between workspaces by dragging them from the right hand side of the window into a workspace on the left hand side.
- Drag workspaces from the list on the left side of the window out to other applications like Finder or Mail so you can share them with other OmniWeb users.
If ever you would like to launch OmniWeb and not have it restore your last active workspace, you can hold the Shift key down while OmniWeb starts and a new workspace will be created and activated. This can be useful if starting OmniWeb into your last-used workspace results in a crash.