Planet Opera
08.05.2008
Opera Community News
Hello Mini
Ever wanted to have your face associated with Opera Mini?
Opera Mini is now in its 4th version, and to celebrate an upcoming release, we want to create a collage featuring people using Opera Mini from around the world. :up:
Therefore, we're reaching out to you. We would like to tribute you on our product pages (among other places) with a picture (head shot) and a testimonial (1-2 sentences) about why you love Opera Mini.
It's recommended that you submit a picture of yourself which is in good quality (high resolution and minimal amount of noise). Feel free to snap a picture of yourself doing something fun while surfing the Web on your phone, or something similar. All you need is a camera and a good chunk of imagination. Just be sure to have your face fairly prominent in the picture.
The reward for those who're used in the collage will receive an Opera goodie-bag and instant Internet fame by being recognized with our smallest (but most powerful) browser . :)
Good luck everyone, and we can't wait to see those testimonials!
Rules
- Deadline is on Monday, May 12th.
- Images are limited to .jpg, .gif, .png and .pdf. If you would like to use a different format, please send an inquiry first.
- Email attachments are limited to 1 MB. Please send an inquiry if your submission is greater than 1 MB size, or if you have a location to host your file (such as your My Opera Community account), simply send the link.
- It is prohibited to send content which is defamatory, offensive or abusive or of an obscene or menacing nature.
- Send your entry to espenao@opera.com as an attachment or upload it to your My Opera Community page, and email the link.
date: 08.05.2008, 16:21, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Espen André Øverdahl)
Opera Labs
Opera announces specification for File I/O access in widgets
Opera has just released a public version of it new specification for File I/O access in widgets, along with a special build, documentation and examples. Find out more in this note.07.05.2008
Arve Bersvendsen
File I/O in widgets and the browser
Ok, so I had a somewhat mystically titled presentation at XTech, titled Going full circle: Giving Web Applications and Widgets access to device and user data. The slides are here (Should work reasonably well in Firefox, WebKit and Opera — does not work in IE. Navigate with PageUp/PageDown or the mouse wheel)
What the presentation was actually about was File I/O in the context of the browser, or more specifically, in widgets. We produced an input paper to be picked up for standardization.
Further, we will release builds on labs.opera.com shortly, so you can get to play with it shortly, and hopefully also with some example code, so you can get your heads wrapped around this.
Edit: There are now public builds for you to play with here — have fun
Charles McCathieNevile
Chicken in China
I spent a few days in Beijing recently. Interesting place...I was in Beijing for the W3C's meeting of Members, which takes place twice a year and is where the people who pay for W3C to survive get together with the staff of the organisation (well, in reality about half or two thirds of the 60-odd staff actually get there) to talk about how to make sure the Web is moving in the right direction.
It's an interesting meeting. W3C has changed a lot over a decade and a bit, and is still changing. It has become more public, its processes have become more rigourous, and it has a much higher focus on testing and real quality than it did when the Web was very very young. Internal discussions are internal, so I can't really tell you what happened, but as always there is plenty to keep track of.
It's also interesting because we are generally sitting down with many of our fiercest competitors, and our (and their) past, present and potential customers trying to figure out how to work together so everyone can benefit. This makes for robust discussion, rather than some rubber stamp for someone or other's vision of the Web and how it needs to evolve.
I also spent a few days with the guys in Opera's Beijing office. A group of friendly and smart folks, it's nice to hang out. We all have work to do, so it never manages to be a big social holiday, but it's good to communicate with people. I did some official stuff, and some social stuff in the evenings.
One of the scariest things I did was go out for chicken wings. I was very tired (and a bit jetlagged after a long afternoon at the office. In the morning I had been to a conference to give a talk, and heard some scary ideas in a keynote that amounted to "give us everything you have, and we will let you use it too". I found out one of the benefits of the Beijing office - there is a great massage place in the basement, so I had a massage. And then we went out to an alley that is old Beijing. (That means it isn't hi-rise - almost everything in Beijing seems new).
In an alley off the alley we came to our destination. A small restaurant that serves chicken wings. you grab a plate, chopsticks, and a glass from the cupboard (they also serve water and beer. And a mango-and-ice mixture that I appreciated). There are napkins in a pile. And you sit down for chicken wings, which come in pairs, each pair on two skewers.
Most of them came in a bucket, and they had been marinated in different stuff before cooking. But the kind office manager had organised something special just for me - spicy chicken wings. I like spicy food - really quite spicy food.
These were really quite spicy. They were covered in chilli, and about halfway through the first one I realised it was really hot chilli. REALLY hot chilli. I had a pause then, a normal spicy wasabi chicken wing, about a bowl full of mango and ice and about a liter and a half of cold beer. It was almost preparation for the second one.
Afterwards we went to a place that claimed to be the smallest bar in Beijing - 12sqm bar, because it is twelve square meters. And behold, it serves meat pies, Coopers' ale (pale, sparkling or stout), and Bundaberg rum. I half-wondered if they had a stash of Tim-tams hidden under the bar. (Now I think of it, maybe I should have asked). An best of all, after only an hour in the bar my tongue had more or less stopped feeling like I was licking coals from a fire.
The rest of the trip was less scary, but just as interesting. Tibet was, at the time, in the news a lot. Chinese people, funnily enough, don't appreciate being told what to do by others. But I think that the average chinese person kows about as much about Tibet as I do. As a bystander, it seems like a complex situation. I generally think that countries should dissolve into larger groupings and into smaller communities (which seems a bit contradictory perhaps, but makes sense to me :p ). But countries don't always like doing that. Euskadi, Chechnya, Norfolk Island, East Timor, Wales, Ireland, the world is full of problems coming from the fact that this isn't ever as easy as it seems.
I went to the Silk Market (it used to be a street, now it is a building like a department store divided into little market stalls) and bargained from a written price tag (even the shopkeeper said that was a joke and offered a 60% discount straight away) to about 20% of the price for a power board. (China has great power boards - they accept any kind of plug I have ever seen). I got a couple of over-priced cookbooks in chinese from the Friendship shop (which when China was really a basically communist country was where foreigners coul buy stuff). I ate frogs (first time outside Australia) an jellyfish (seems to be common in China) and lots of other stuff, mostly pretty recognisable and almost all really good. I saw friends and went to good restaurants. I discovered that one of the guys in China is a professional standard translator (although that isn't his day-job). Overall, I had a good time with people it is always a pleasure to see, and with people it was a pleasure to meet.
I need to learn Chinese. In Beijing some people speak great english. But many don't speak any. Writing the address of the place I want to go has to be done in chinese. But despite that only one taxi driver (the official one I picked up at the airport) tried to rip me off, and people were generally friendly and polite. I guess people selling stuff in a market are a bit of an exception anyway, but I was still amazed by the saleswoman I saw in the Silk Market yelling at a potential customer "What's wrong with you!?" as though it was their fault they didn't want to waste a lot of time bargaining from an outrageous ambit price to something they thought was reasonable.
date: 07.05.2008, 18:21, author: chaals@opera.com (Charles McCathieNevile)
Haavard K. Moen
Opera Dragonfly is here, and it works offline
Opera Dragonfly is out, as most people probably know by now. If not, check out the Opera Dragonfly blog for the juicy details. To start using it, just go get Opera 9.5 Beta 2, then go to the "Tools > Advanced > Developer Tools" menu.While Opera Dragonfly is indeed a Web application which is accessed from an online server the first time you use it, it will actually be cached for offline use. In other words, we will not be spying on you while you are debugging your code :)
Here's a brief description from the Opera Dragonfly product page:
Opera Dragonfly is a new breed of hybrid application. Part desktop application, part web application, it resides in local persistent storage, yet instantly updates when a new version is released – just like your favorite web sites. You never have to check for updates or install a new version.
You should also be able to install it on your computer manually by downloading the source, unzipping it somewhere (such as C:\Dragonfly), and then pointing DeveloperToolsURL to the new location (in this case, file://localhost/c:/Dragonfly/client.xml).
Note that Opera Dragonfly is far from feature complete, as you will soon figure out if you read the product description and documentation. A lot of nice features, such as HTTP or XHR logging, or docking the UI, is not yet available, but is already planned for a future release.
Remember, this is just the first alpha!
date: 07.05.2008, 16:20, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Haavard)
David Storey
Favourite Opera Dragonfly comment
* Well, it is if you're only a couple of cms tall.Dragonflies don't pupate, they have a nymph stage that, far from being a static pupa, is one of the most fearsome* predators in your local pond. OK, back to the geek stuff
In response to The Register's article Opera Dragonfly emerges from pupa. As Opera Dragonfly is still in alpha, it hasn't evolved from the nymph stage yet anyway. We have a nice cartoon image about that, which I'll see if we can publish soon.
date: 07.05.2008, 16:19, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (David Storey)
Eirik Stavem
Opera Dragonfly
Finally - it's official! Opera Dragonfly is out in an alpha release that looks really good. I've been playing around with it for a while in the internal 9.5 builds, and it's helped me a out a number of times already. More importantly, it's allowed me to debug errors without having to open Firefox with Firebug installed, which is a Good Thing™ in itself.Read more about features and road map on opera.com/products/dragonfly/.
Digg
Web Developer tools from Opera (Alpha 1)
Released on a open source BSD license! * Reach breaking point step by step * Debug the DOM * Spot your errors * Redefine your style * Think open and free * Debug your phone or TV * Always up to dateAsa Dotzler
odd month out update
Ken Kovash has an update on the Net Applications Market Share data for the month of April that reported an across the board drop in not-IE market share and a pretty substantial spike for IE 6.
Long story short, the report was wrong, Firefox did not lose share, IE didn't have a massive spike, and Net Applications will be posting a corrected report.
The April, 2008 market share data has some significant variations from established trends. The following major anomalies occurred on April 18th:A 25% increase in visitors A 3% drop in Firefox share A 4.9% increase in Internet Explorer 6.0 share A 3.4% increase in Windows XP share (with a small drop in Mac share) A .7% drop in Windows Vista share
Since April 18th, all trends have returned to expected values, including an expected uptick in Vista share due to the release of SP1.
Once we discovered the extent of the variations, we have worked diligently to discover the cause. The variations were coincidental to the release of Vista SP1 to automatic updates, so we initially thought there might be a connection. However, our investigation showed Vista SP1 had nothing to do with the problem.
What happened was a distributed collection of sites inadvertently caused the problem. We can't identity the sites responsible, but the nature of the problem is that all the millions of new visitors we saw were part of a massive marketing campaign that only worked on Internet Explorer. This glitch caused respective drops in Firefox, Safari and Opera share.
We are in the process of removing the skewing data. It should be completed by May 7th.
So, one anomalous day that was enough to skew the monthly report. Now, had I subscribed to Net Application's super cool upgraded version, I'd have seen this as a one week anomaly in a specific geography (weekly reports and geo location data being the key parts of the paid upgrade,) and a return to normal trends before the month was over, saving me a few gray hairs. Live and learn :-)
A big thanks to Ken Kovash and Net Applications for getting to the bottom of this.
06.05.2008
David Storey
It's here
Opera Dragonfly is finally released. This is an initial alpha, so beware that there will still be bugs, missing features and performance optimisations that need to be done. Never fear, as we can now use Opera Dragonfly to debug itself.
If you run Mac OS X, there is a bug which Opera Dragonfly managed to hit (it is an expert bug hunter), where OS X's video memory gets corrupted on exit. Due to this we blocked access to Opera 9.5 beta 2. A new build which works around this problem can be found here.
This was my first project as Product Manager, so it was an interesting experience, but everything fell into place, and we seem to have had a smooth launch so far, even hitting Techcrunch.
Being an alpha, the main reason for this release is to gather developer feedback, so if you have time to test it out, we've very much appreciate it if you could send us your feedback and feature requests. You can do this on the feedback page. We also have a new Team Dragonfly blog.
Happy bug hunting.
date: 06.05.2008, 20:47, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (David Storey)
Lars Kleinschmidt
Customize the number of items in speed dial
Remco discovered a nice hidden feature in Kestrel that many people have been waiting for since the introduction of speed dial about a year ago:
You can edit the number of items shown in speed dial!
To do that browse to your "profile" directory (see "Help > About Opera" for its location), open "speeddial.ini" in a text edit (e.g. Notepad) and append the following lines:
[Size] Rows=4 Columns=5
Don't use too large numbers though or Opera will use all your CPU for quite some time.
Thanks Opera developers for implementing this very popular request and Remco for finding it!
date: 06.05.2008, 20:37, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Lars Kleinschmidt)
Dev.Opera
Opera Dragonfly Architecture
In this article, Hans S. Tommerholt covers the architecture of Opera Dragonfly in detail.Introduction to Opera Dragonfly
In this article, Chris Mills gives you the lowdown on Opera's exciting new developer tools release - Opera Dragonfly - revealing how to use it, and what all the parts of the application do. This is an alpha version, so let us know what you think!Rowan Mulder
Opera Dragonfly Alpha released
As expected Opera Software released the first alpha of Dragonfly, their first serious attempt in providing developer tools for the web developer community.
Our previous guesses at what Dragonfly could be are right, it's Opera Software answer to the famous third party Firebug project for Firefox. When using one of Kestrel's latest releases you will be able to access the developer tools from the menu: Tools -> Advanced -> Developer Tools. I hope Opera will make it easier to access this, like Firebug, having an icon in the status bar or something.
First time
The first thing you'll notice is that it takes a little time to load, especially compared to Firebug which is simply, just there. The reason behind this is quite clear, the entire Opera Dragonfly interface is made out of Web technologies and not using any native stuff, therefore Opera Software is in full control to update Dragonfly as their internal development team sees fit. In addition this is one of the very first times that something is open-source, as it's freely viewable under the BSD license.
The first thing I miss is that it's not possible, by default, to look at your current web site and inspect the CSS (inherited) styles of any visual element, which is possible using Firebug (and the Web Developer Tool bar). In Dragonfly you can however browse through your source code and select the elements and see their CSS, computed and source. Also handy is the quick find inside the CSS browser window, especially when your site has large CSS files.
Browsing through the DOM tree reveals what I'd expect, but the lack of a real tree structure visually makes it harder to look at (you know the dotted indicated of a tree and sub directories and files, like Windows (File) Explorer).
The JavaScript debugger looks nice as it supports breakpoints, a command line, thread inspection and more. However the first bugs show up when setting breakpoints, the GUI indication is in the line numbers. Also the mouse indicator is always a hand, which implies clicking the content, and not being able to select etc.
More to come
Of course this is only an alpha build and my own experience is really the first ten minutes ever. Opera Software can update everything easily, but I do think the speed may be an issue, as well as not being able to visually click elements or share your browser window with the editor for a successful first time experience.
However the later one will appear later as we look at the list of promised features: support for editing of CSS, JavaScript and the DOM, a single window mode, improved JavaScript thread handling, XHR and HTTP monitoring, improved keyboard navigation.
Hallvord R. M. Steen
Dragonfly arriving
Dragonfly blog has details and download links. dev.opera.com has technical details and tutorials.
Now, this is an alpha release. Some issues you may have to overlook gracefully include:
- If you enable breaking on every script, the debugger will also break when Opera runs browser.js or user scripts - but no code will appear in the code pane! You will have to click "run" one or more times to get past your user scripts.
- It only responds every second time you press [F10].. :(
- Live CSS editing is missing..
- ..and so is HTTP logging and some other nice features that will arrive later.
That said, Dragonfly is already making itself useful in its present form. Have fun with it!
date: 06.05.2008, 18:29, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid ( Hallvord R. M. Steen)
Opera Community News
Opera Dragonfly
Try the first alpha of our new web developer tool.
Today, we released the first alpha of our new web developer tool!
The objective for this release is to gather feedback, but also allow you start using it. You can expect it to be buggy, and even miss some key features, but this is why you have an alpha release.
Download Opera 9.5 beta 2 with Dragonfly
If you think this is good, then help us digg it!
Enjoy!
date: 06.05.2008, 18:00, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Espen André Øverdahl)
Opera Mini
Upgrade with BiDi support for feeds
The Opera Mini 4 servers have been upgraded with quite a few improvements. To begin with the servers should now be nicer to phones that are low on available memory. but what we are are especially pleased with the new feed system and hope you will like it too:
- Improved feed (RSS/Atom) viewer to support for bidirectional text and layout. Oh, and it's faster.
- Fixed bug with <select> items being wrongly positioned.
- Fixed problem with images in <object> tags not being rendered correctly.
- Made sure image maps gets rescaled to fit the screen width.
- Fixed problem with page being zoomed in when going to page which is in history.
- Fixed problem with some phones with little memory getting too many images.
- The server now prioritizes sending images at the top of the document if the phone's too low on memory to display them all.
- Downloading of files which require authentication now works (gmail etc).
- Redesigned the file download page.
date: 06.05.2008, 17:06, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid ()
Opera Desktop Team
Getting ready for Dragonfly...
Here's a new snapshot with a nice mix of bugfixes, enhancements and new bugs. Oh, and be sure to keep an eye on the Dragonfly blog later today :cool:
WARNING: These are development snapshots: they contain the latest changes, but they also have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations. In fact, they may not work at all.
Known Issues
- [Bug 328318] Wand usually doesn't work
- [Bug 327180] Dragonfly does not work when JavaScript is disabled
- [Bug 324985] International installer on Windows is broken when using some languages
- [Bug 324377] Save Linked Content As fails sporadically
- [Bug 327333] Some SVGs do not paint on Windows
- [Bug 328186] Crash when using Master Password
- [Bug 324727] The Octoshape plug-in causes Opera to crash on start-up
- The tab bar on Mac may mix up favicon/text placement
Changelog
- Line breaks in Notes are now preserved when sync'ing data
- application/x-msdownload files are not always saved with an .exe extension anymore
- Lots of improvements on certificates UI
- Improvements on certificate handling and on the new certificate repository
- New look for the address field dropdown
- New cookie confirmation dialog
- Several stability fixes
- Several performance improvements to JavaScript
- Offline mode is improved
- Fixed a crash when reindexing mail
- Fixed problem fetching POP mail from web.de (and many other providers)
- Show "Password not displayed" instead of always showing six asterisks for Opera Mail passwords
- Improved POP performance when checking for new mail
- SMTP authentication will now default to Auto instead of None
- Fixed problem where many feed items were not downloaded
Platform-specific
- [Mac] New tab look (thanks lachralle!)
- [UNIX] Fixed some CJK issues in the UI
Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX
date: 06.05.2008, 16:30, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Joachim Blaabjerg)
Mac Team
New Kestrel snapshot: 4808
New snapshot today, check out the Desktop Team blog for a complete changelog and known issues list. I'll keep it short and sweet with two highlights:
Download build 4808
date: 06.05.2008, 16:28, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Joachim Blaabjerg)
Opera Community News
Stop the spam!
We are doing our best to protect you from SPAM and any other kind of offensive content. Here's how you can protect yourself and help us help you!
We're doing our best to protect you from SPAM. However, we still receive complaints about this issue. So, we would like to give you a piece of advice on how you can help us, but at the same time protect yourself (and the My Opera Community) if somebody's bothering you with unwanted messages.
Here are some helpful pointers:
- If you receive a private message (PM) and you think it's SPAM, you have a button called "Mark selected as SPAM". Just select the unwanted messages and send it to the SPAM box. Our moderators will do the rest of the work, and if the user is a real spammer he/she will be banned and the messages removed.
- Another tool you can use to protect ourself from people you don't know, you can choose not to receive messages from those who are not in your friendlist. To make it work go to My Page -> Account -> Edit Profile. In "Community Messaging" there is an "Allow messages from:" option. This is your magic tool! Choose "Friends and moderators" and "Save profile". From this moment on you'll never receive messages from users who are not added as a friend.
- And last, but not least, if you're faced with SPAM messages, which contain obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful or threatening content that violates our terms of service and might be harmful for anyone of the My Opera Community, please, contact us directly, or report it in the correct forum topic:
And finally, we are more than 1,4 millions members, and we hope to grow even more. Please contribute to make this community safe and enjoyable for everyone, but most importantly: Let's do it together!
date: 06.05.2008, 13:21, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Espen André Øverdahl)
Opera Press Releases
Opera Dragonfly on the prowl
Opera desktop news05.05.2008
Opera Community News
Smiley winners
Check out all the cool smiley impersonations we received. :)
The "winner" of our contest is igorditerni's impersonation of the infamous :ninja: smiley.
He has clearly worked a lot on this submission, which can be seen in a forum post. He even made a new version of the original smiley, but replacing himself with the smiley instead. :up:
We all know agony's a drunk, and now we finally got proof! :P
Your contribution to this contest was a really good one! Please promise one thing — never take off that hat. It suits you perfectly.
From Mizz Martinez we didn't receive only one submission, but 30!
From the huge photo album it wasn't easy to pick one which justified the hard word she had done for this contest, but we really fell for her impersonation of the :idea: smiley. Good work!
However, there were many others who also did a fantastic job impersonating smileys. Thanks to everyone who made this contest a success. We hope you will enjoy this sweet list we've compiled for you:
| Smiley: | By: | Smiley: | By: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| :irked: | FierceDeity | eztigma | :jester: | yelesh | |
| :drunk: | Herrscher | Hellas | :cheers: | eztigma | |
| :yikes: | Riku90 | djosh_losh | naoo | :hat: | andresruiz | |
| :D | djosh_losh | :ko: | djosh_losh | Olgita | |
| :up: | djosh_losh | :eyes: | soumitram4u | Olgita | Garion | |
| :chef: | hreyes | :monkey: | robin_schalkhaar | |
| :beer: | Olgita | :cat: | Olgita | Furie | |
| :happy: | Olgita | kennethkiffer | :mad: | Olgita | |
| ;) | Olgita | :alien: | parolin | |
| :right: | dragon_harrower | :awww: | yelesh | |
| Multiple smileys: | Spaggyj | Furie | robin_schalkhaar | |||
date: 05.05.2008, 14:21, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Espen André Øverdahl)
02.05.2008
Opera Community News
Member of the week
This week's spotlighted blogger is a really good one.
Her blog is a great read of events she has attended (such as the St. Louis Fashion Week), or things happening in her own local community. It's truly a great read. :up:
Many of you will also recognize the talented blogger Richard, also known as "musickna", captured below? Well, this picture is when they finally met for a cup of coffee at Starbucks recently (which they've actually been planning for 3 months):
This is really cool, and a solid proof that the virtual world of My Opera Community and the real world do, in fact, cross from time to time. :up:
Oh, by the way, she's happily married, so no more solicitations for online romances! :P
Naomi, for everything you've contributed with so far, it's no wonder that you're this week's member of the week. Big congratulations, and keep up the great work you're doing! :cheers:
date: 02.05.2008, 17:18, author: address-withheld@my.opera.com.invalid (Espen André Øverdahl)
Lawrence Eng
Going to BarCamp
This Saturday, I'll be at BarCamp San Diego 3. I'll be talking to people about Opera, of course.
We're also a sponsor, as is Microsoft. In fact, this BarCamp is being held at Microsoft's San Diego office. Should be interesting ;)
date: 02.05.2008, 01:19, author: lawrence.eng@opera.com (Lawrence Eng)
01.05.2008
FavBrowser.com
Readers’ Choice Awards 2008 (Linux)
Time for some awards. This time it’s “The Readers’ Choice Awards 2008 (Linux)”.
Of course, there was the favorite web browser category as well. So who’ve won? It’s Firefox. As you can see from the results below, it received a total of 86% votes. Opera and Konqueror received less than 5% of Linux community votes. (more…)
Asa Dotzler
firefox wins again
Not just a victory, but a domination: Firefox wins the LinuxJournal's Readers' Choice Awards once again and this time with 86% of respondents giving the thumbs up to Firefox.
Firefox wins Favorite Web Browser with 86% of your votes. But where, oh where, have the very capable Opera and Konqueror gone? Fewer than 5% of you named them your favorite browser.
Linux is kind of an unknown when we talk about Firefox users. Because most Linux users get Firefox from their Linux distribution rather than from Mozilla, we don't have any decent visibility into how many of them there are. What we do know from this survey, and many others like it, is that Firefox is far and away the top browser on Linux.
This is a testament to the power of "shipping with the OS" and to the strength of Firefox considering that most Linux users are very comfortable downloading and trying new programs.
30.04.2008
Arve Bersvendsen
Widgets, F2F and XTech
Next week, the Web Application Formats Working group is meeting in Dublin, Ireland for a face-to-face session where we will be tackling quite a few issues:
- Processing Model
- Security Model (I have some input prepared for this, since Opera defines a rather extensive security model for widgets
- A proposal for handling internationalization and localization for widgets - this stuff is hard, and to paraphrase Consultant Barbie: I18N is hard, let’s go shopping
- Digital signatures for widgets
- Automatic updates for widgets
- Default widget icon
- Tagging and classification for widgets
This week, Marcos has been visiting the Opera headquarters, for a three day sit-down and preparation session where we have handled some of the issues, and made good headway, both in terms of the Packaging and Configuration - in particular I18N, we’ve also done quite a bit of real hard work on APIs and events, which we’ll publish soon. Not to say that we’re out of challenges.
Please note that the agenda items listed above are not a final list of what we’ll be spending the better part of two days talking about. As noted above, WAF has a public mailing list on which you can propose input.
We’ll attempt to keep you updated at what we’re doing during the meeting through Twitter.
On a similar note, I am also going to XTech 2008, and will be presenting a session called Going full circle: Giving Web Applications and Widgets access to device and user data. If you want to know where widgets differ from offline web applications, my talk should at least give you a few pointers. As for talks, I’ll also see if I can get a slot for the 20:20 lightning talks
29.04.2008
Christian Sinding-Larsen
Little letter block wallpaper
I felt like making a new wallpaper today, so i found a crappy image with Google image search and played with it a bit. Of course I had to do a take on the Opera logo again; my imagination runs on a really empty tank these days.
For those interrested, I removed the really nasty jpeg artifacts in Photoshop with Filter > Noise > Reduce Noise..., then scaled the image up really much (to 1600x1600px) and ran a Filter > Blur > Lens Blur and added some monochrome gaussian noise as well as some blur. I then swapped the red and blue channels and tweaked the colors some more to get the blue color a nice red one. Not happy with the texture, I overlayed the painted area with a wooden high-res texture. On top of that I added a slight bevel/emboss layer effect and another vague texture.
The Shadow is just a horizontally motion blurred oval shape repeated a couple of times with some different scaling to imitate the shadow getting fainter away from the cube. I burned the bottom edges of the cube and copied the whole thing, flipped it around vertically and masked it with a gradient and removed that part to make a nice reflection. For the background I simply made a radial gradient with a center below the block.
See the attached psd file if you would like to tweak or play with this. Have fun!
Wallpaper_Block_O.psd
