Opera

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: I updated the delicious button to the new version of delicious.com (the old ones are still working, though) and updated the theme to the latest Opera default theme. I also added a modified classic theme which works with Opera 5.60 (including scroll markers).

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)

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)

TinyURL

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

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. If you use the default skin of Opera you can just use my modified version of it: new skin / classic skin(click to install). 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

As I consider myself some kind of a hardcore minimalist I want to share with you the last optimizations I did to Opera. In an older article I already wrote about my basic Opera setup.

What I changed now is removing the menu bar (since I don't use it too much anyway) and adding a toggle, to get it back. I also added usercss based ad blocking, which works really good.