Hi all,

I'm very happy to (finally) announce the first release of my latest 
project. OmniBrowser is a ground-up rewrite of our venerable system 
browser, designed with an eye towards flexibility and extensibility. In 
effect, it's a browser framework, a platform for experimenting with 
interfaces for complex object graphs.

For the first release, and probably for the next several updates, I'll 
focus on mimicking the functionality and features of the existing 
development tools, with only minor improvements here and there. Beyond 
that, I'd like to start experimenting with "next generation" 
development tools. I've got a ton of ideas, and I'm sure many of you 
will as well.

In any case, please do kick it around and tell me what you think.

This release adds the following items to the open menu:

Image Browser - just like the current system browser
Package Browser - adds a package pane, as defined by PackageInfo
File Browser - browses the file system, kind like the Mac OS X Finder.

Some things to try:

Click on a package and choose the 'browse' menu command.
Click on a method and choose the 'chase implementors' menu command.

As far as stability goes, this is alpha software and all the usual 
caveats apply. I've adopted it as my primary development environment, 
so as to eat my own dog food on a regular-basis, but I wouldn't 
recommend that to anyone else. Not yet, anyway.

Please play around with

Known issues:

The File Browser is less robust than the code browsers. In particular, 
it doesn't handle file system errors well.

Many features are still missing from the code browsers, some of them 
fairly basic.

The text handling in the code pane inherits a lot from TextMorphEditor, 
and much of that needs to be overriden to take advantage of the rest of 
the OmniBrowser framework.

The optionalButtons and annotation panes aren't implemented yet.

Test coverage of code contexts has some holes.

Deleting the root node of a browser is not well handled.

Probably lots of bugs I haven't noticed.


Cheers,

Colin