YuMDaP.net's blog

Am Freitag hat Chris von Linux und ich ein Blog-Stöckchen zum Thema Darum mag ich Foobar gestartet. Es geht darum besondere Aspekte eines Programmes hervorzuheben, welches man auf seinem Desktop nicht mehr missen möchte. Blog-Paraden finde ich eher nervig, aber das Konzept von Chris gefällt mir, weil man auch von bekannten Programmen neue Aspekte kennenlernt. Aus Chris' Darum mag ich Totem habe ich bspw. gelernt, dass man in Totem automatisch Untertitel aus dem Netz laden kann.

Hier also mein ungefragter Beitrag zum meines Erachtens am meisten unterschätzten Stück Software: Dem Opera Browser. Und der Aspekt, den ich hervorheben möchte ist...

Opera als Recherchetool

Opera Sitzungen

Der Schlüssel zu Operas Nützlichkeit als Recherchetool ist die Sitzungsverwaltung, welche man unter Fenster und Tabs -> Sitzungen erreicht. Man kann alle geöffneten Tabs als Sitzung abspeichern. Es werden allerdings nicht nur die Adressen der geöffneten Tabs gespeichert. Es wird die gesamte History jedes einzelnen Tabs gespeichert. Also auch die Seiten, die innerhalb des Tabs zuvor besucht wurden. Ausserdem merkt sich Opera, an welche Stelle die einzelen Seiten gescrollt waren. Das gilt sowohl für die aktuellen Seiten in einem Tab, wie auch für die in der History.

Öffnet man später eine Sitzung kann man so leicht nachvollziehen, wo man in seinen Recherchen stehengeblieben ist. Dadurch ähnelt die Sitzungsverwaltung von Opera eher einem Haufen aufgeschlagener Bücher mit Haftnotizen, als einer Sammlung von Bookmarks.

Ich möchte noch ein paar weitere Punkte nennen, die Opera als Recherechetool nützlich machen. Zum einen gibt es eine Möglichkeit Tabs (thematisch) zu gruppieren. Diese Funktion wird Tab Stacking genannt (Video). Gerade bei einer Recherche navigiert man auch viel in der History hin und her. Opera unterstützt das nicht nur, in dem es sich merkt, wo man vergangene Seiten verlassen hat. Angenehm ist auch die Geschwindigkeit, mit der man navigieren kann. Zum einen gibt es keine Ladezeit. Seiten aus der History werden ohne Verzögerung angezeigt. Zum anderen beschleunigen Operas integrierte Mausgesten die Navigation immens. Will man bspw. 5 Seiten zurückblättern hält man die rechte Maustaste gedrückt und tippt 5x auf die linke Taste. Vorwärts blättern funktioniert genau umgekehrt.

Abschließende Tips: Auf einigen Seiten hat man doch Ladezeiten beim Blättern (wenn sie extensiv Javascript nutzen). Diese Ladezeiten eliminiert man, wenn man opera:config#UserPrefs|HistoryNavigationMode auf dem Wert 3 setzt. Will man Seitenladezeiten noch weiter optimieren, empfehle ich den integrierten Flashblocker zu aktivieren (funktioniert wie das Flashblock-Addon von Firefox) mit STRG+F12 -> Erweitert -> Plug-ins nur auf Aufforderung aktivieren.

UPDATE: the current version of direc.tor doesn't seem to work with delicious.com. I contacted the author to see if he's going to fix it. If not I might try to fix it myself. Stay tuned.

the GUI

In this article I will show you how to seamlessly integrate this with Opera. You will never ever want to miss this again ;)

UPDATE 2010-07.03:Added latest theme for Opera 10.60 in Unix and Windows versions. (if you provide me with the default Mac skin, I can modify that, too).

Alright everyone. I admit I have abandoned this site for quite a while but this stops now ;-). For my first post in a while, let me share with you what I did to make my favourite browser even better and more useful.

I've created a set of buttons which you can add to your Opera browser. I made these out of bookmarklets, so if you don't use Opera (which would be a shame) you can still use the regular bookmarklets with your browser. These are the buttons:

And this is what they do (just click on the titles to add the buttons to Opera or drag and drop the bookmarklet-links on your Firefox bookmarks bar):

Post to del.icio.us

Post the current page to your del.icio.us bookmarks. del.icio.us is a very cool service that lets you save sites you come across to their online service and easily access them or share them with friends. Once you tried it you will never want to miss it again! (bookmarklet)

Post to del.icio.us

New delicious button.

BugMeNot

If a site requires you to log in to continue (i.e. nytimes.com) simply click this button to get a username and password immediately. Very cool because you can avoid annoying registrations. (bookmarklet)

Search this domain

If you ever had the problem that the search on the site (i.e. newspaper) you are currently viewing sucks, use this button to do a google-search on the current site only. (bookmarklet)

is.gd

A great URL shortener

direc.tor

A unique way of organizing your delicious bookmarks ajax style (bookmarklet)

The last one (direc.tor) is especially cool. It allows you to search-as-you-type in all your del.icio.us bookmarks and has a nice tag-browser. Take a look at the following screenshot to see how it works.

click to enlarge

One last thing: You don't get those nice icons for the new buttons automatically. They have to be added to the skin you are using. Here is a list of modified skins I made (last updated 10-07-03):

• Opera 10.60 final standard
• Opera 10.60 final Unix

To make use of the new icons you will also need a different set of buttons. Use these:

I know this article is similar to one I have written before. But since there are some additions and changes I figured I might just reciycle it ;-)

Cheers,
Matthias

On September 20th Opera ASA decided to make it's award-winning webbrowser Opera free of charge. Previously you could get a free copy with advertisement banners inside the program. As of version 8.50 these are removed.

What this means is, that even the most notorious IE or Firefox users have no more excuses for not enjoying the Internet as it is meant to be. Now go and download Opera ;-), see what it can do, have a look at the tutorials or the tips and tricks and join the community. If you want to get really advanced have a look at the Opera Wiki.

As a little starter I made some custom buttons for you. To use them just click on the links and they will be added to the My buttons section in the customization menu (SHIFT+F12). After that you can drag them wherever you want them to be in you very own Opera. My preferation looks like this:

click to enlarge

BugMeNot

If a site requires you to log in to continue (i.e. nytimes.com) simply click this button to get a username and password immediately

Search this domain

Do a google-search on the site you are currently viewing

TinyURL

if you want to send the currently open address to someone and it's very long... just make it tiny!

Hope you like these buttons, cheers
Matthias

I never found the time to have a look at Opera Show. I mean I have seen presentations, but I never took the time learning how to do them myself. Now since I have to hold a presentation in a couple of weeks I take this as an opportunity to get rid of Powerpoint and start using Opera as my presentation tool of choice.

My first stop was the Opera Show tutorial. It gave me a general overview on how these CSS-driven presentations work. The best and fastest way to figure out how Opera Show presentations are supposed to be structured, is to have a look at the OSF 1.0 (Opera Show Format) specifications. After that it is a good idea to create a dummy presentation with the Opera Show Generator and save it as an .xml file. The cool thing is: Your whole presentation (including images) can be in one single xml-file. Easily distributable on the web. But more on that later.

I took the xml-file apart and stored the stylesheets and javascript in seperate files to get a clearer view on the xml. At this point one can see how easy to understand (and use) the OSF-xml is. Of course taking the file apart is not in the intentions of the OSF. That is why we will now have a look on how to have all the data in-line.

In RFC2378 a new url-scheme was proposed in 1998. Most browsers support this, Internet Explorer doesn't, though. The URLs look like this: data:[<mediatype>][;base64],<data> where mediatype is the MIME type of the data (i.e. image/png) and data is the at-best BASE64-encoded file. This URL can be put directly where you usually would link to the file. See this link for example.

The proccess of creating multiple data: urls was a little annoying for me, so I wrote a little Java app which I called data:url Dropper. It allows you to drag and drop multiple files inside it's window and displays the corresponding data: urls. You can start it directly using Java Web Start or download the self-executing dataurl.jar. It is free for use and I will put it under the GPL as soon as a find the time to publish the sourcecode.

I hope you like it. Feel free to leave comments or improvement suggestions. I should point out this is just a quick hack. The MIME types of the files are detected by the file-extension and until now I only look for bmp, gif, jpeg, jpe, jpg, png, tif, svg and svgz. If the input file is none of these the MIME type will be none. It can be adjusted manually, though ;-)

Later
Matthias