The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera web browser

Greetings from 2005. Rebekah and I celebrated the beginning of the new year looking out our sky light windows at fireworks throughout the city. Neighbors a rooftop away shot fireworks seemingly through their skylight, cheering and laughing for each. Hundreds of fireworks brightened the midnight sky with whites, greens, and reds.

Unlike what Rebekah and I are familiar with from the States, there didn't seem to be one central firework display. Rather, there were dozens of displays, filling the air with cracks and pops for nearly half an hour. We had originally planned on attending a party on a hill east of the city where we would have had a great view of the entire city. Alas, we decided to have a quiet evening alone. We shall have to have a better look at the fireworks from above the city next year.

In any case, Happy New Year!

As previously reported, the IMAP back-end is being rewritten to correct several known limitations in the IMAP implementation. We had surmised that this rewrite would become available in Opera 8.0, but that will not be the case. There has been no change in the priority or schedule of this rewrite, Opera 8.0 simply came earlier than expected. The rewrite is almost complete and we expect to begin testing it internally at the beginning of next year. The IMAP rewrite will most likely accompany server-side message manipulation for POP. We will not be releasing any further details about the rewrite at this time.

Many people have asked for a way to do address completion using Ctrl+Enter a la IE. Well, thanks to the investigative work of Lee Harvey, Steven V. Gunhouse, and Lauri Raittila from the Opera newsgroups, we now have a good way to do this.

In the keyboard editor, go to the Document window section and add a new shortcut for "enter ctrl". Then, enter the command 'Search, "http://www.%s.com/"'. Now, this shouldn't interfere with Wand, as long as focus is in the address bar.

You can also add commands for other address endings, like .net, .org, .co.uk, etc. Enjoy!

Opera 7.60 Preview 2 for Windows Mobile has been released. Check out the changelog, press release, or just go download it. Enjoy. :)

Some users are running into a rather unfortunate situation of Opera 7.60 Preview 4 crashing on startup or when manually initiating a check for new releases. This only happens when Opera Mail is disabled. Add the following to your opera6.ini file while Opera is closed to disable the check:

[User prefs]
Check For New Opera=0

If that setting already exists (there's a good chance), change the value to 0. The value indicates the "unix time" in seconds since the last check (I think ;)).

Oh, and remember to remove that setting, should you do an upgrade install in the future. :)

I've temporarily disabled anonymous comments due to a recent onslaught of comment spam affecting Drupal sites. I hope to have a solution to this problem soon.

UPDATE: Alright, I've installed a spam module to see if this helps. It's going to take a while to learn from the spam, so some stuff may show up, but should be eradicated shortly there after.

Periodically, I'll be posting Top 10 lists in my journal. Sometimes the list will be about problems, sometimes about ideas, sometimes about other stuff I haven't thought of yet. I'd like for others to post Top 10 lists about the same subject, so I can get a good idea how others feel. You can post in a comment, on a MyOpera journal, on a blog, in an appropriate forum, etc. But make sure you post a comment here telling me where you posted. ;)

Disclaimer: Any list is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the focus of Opera Software.

I'm going to start with usability issues. Usability issues are things that make it hard to use Opera. They are usually not missing features, but can be in extreme cases. And they are not accessibility issues (a topic for another Top 10 list ;)) or Opera Mail issues.

So, here goes (in no particular order):

1. Link addresses in tooltips. They block useful information on web sites (specifically in CSS/DHTML menus). They are usually pointless if you have the Status bar enabled.
2. Intrusive notifiers (download completed, new mail received, popup blocked, etc.). There needs to be a way to configure what notifiers appear, how often, and for how long.
3. Cookie management. Cookie management is one of the most confusing and intrusive things in Opera. Set Opera to warn about cookies and you're assaulted by dialogs. And the dialogs don't make much sense, either.
4. System tray icon. There should be an option to toggle the display of the system tray icon independent of the Opera Mail toggle.
5. Customization via INI files. There needs to be an easier way to customize Opera (not just the UI, but settings, too) than via INI files. The INI files aren't well-documented, you have to shut down Opera in-between changes, and they're difficult for novice users.
6. Link-style panels. The new link-style panels (i.e. one-click triggers actions) create several problems when you want to manage the items in the panel, rather than open them. Selecting multiple items, moving items, and removing items can all be problematic. Windows Explorer has an interesting solution to this. In any case, this should be configurable on a per-panel basis.
7. Bookmark management. There are various problems with bookmark management, specifically when adding new bookmarks. It's very difficult to add a new bookmark to the root bookmark folder (you have to unselect all other folders) and the folder select widget is tiny.
8. Wand notification. The first time Wand pops up telling me that it can save a password for a site, I go into preferences and disable Wand. I don't want dialogs telling me such things. Give me a button or something.
9. Customizations lost between upgrades. If there have been changes in the UI, customizations have to be redone. I have to change keyboard shortcuts any time a keyboard action is changed because I like Ctrl+R to mean Reload from cache.
10. Importing settings. There's currently no method for importing settings from previous installations. There should be an easy, centralized method of importing preferences, bookmarks, cookies, Wand, etc.

Rebekah and I celebrated our first Thanksgiving together last Thursday as foreigners in a new land. We ate our feast with a group of believers we met through Christian Union: Ian (not the same Ian I've written about previously), our host and a financial news correspondent, Bob, a telecommunications systems consultant, and Johnson, a Nigerian seeking asylum in Norway due to religious persecution in his home land. We dined on juicy turkey, cornbread stuffing, mounds of mashed potatoes, marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes, butter-drenched green beans, sweet corn pudding, and crispy rolls. Rebekah contributed the corn pudding and the pumpkin pie we had for dessert, her first Thanksgiving dishes.

The evening began with just a group of strangers. We stood in the kitchen and chatted about our time in Norway and our family histories. As the night wound down, we sat by the fire, prayed for our new friend, Johnson, and taught him about the original pilgrims. We are all away from our homes, trying to make it in a new place. And we came together to share what little we have to make the day better for everyone. It was a great way to spend our first Thanksgiving.

One of the traditions we've had in our family is to share the things for which we're thankful. Over the past couple of months, Rebekah and I have been repeatedly blessed by the generosity of her parents. This Christmas, they're flying us home to be with our families. They've taken care of shipping all our belongings here. They've just been overall wonderful. Of the things I'm thankful for this year, they top my list.

It's been amazing being a part of their family and it's only been three months. The next fifty years are gonna rock! They don't ask for anything in return, either. I guess that wouldn't make it all so sweet. And I don't think they're silently hoping for some repayment. They're just being themselves.

I'm just blown away by their love. I hope that we can someday repay them. I don't mean by only being generous to them. I hope we can spread the generosity to others. That's what I've taken away from Thanksgiving this year: give with an open heart and expect nothing in return. It was a great first Thanksgiving.

In 7.60 Preview 4, you can use an INI setting to change the default rendering mode to one of the ERA modes.

The setting is:

  [User Prefs]
  Rendering Mode=n

where n is -1 to 4: -1 is ERA, 0 is normal, and 1 to 4 are the various ERA modes (SSR, CSSR, AMSR, and MSR, respectively). And, in case you're wondering:

• SSR = Small-Screen Rendering
• CSSR = Color SSR
• AMSR = Aggressive MSR
• MSR = Medium-Screen Rendering
• ERA = Extensible Rendering Architecture (ERA = SSR + CSSR + MSR + AMSR + a bit of magic)

Details about the various modes shall for the time being remain secret.

Update: I had AMSR and MSR backwards before. Sorry about that.

Update^2: The ERA setting doesn't seem to be implemented. I'm working on that. :)

Update^3 (2006-03-08): As of Opera 9.0 Preview 2, ERA can be set as the default rendering mode by using the value -1.

Mrs. Helms sent us the following scan from The Capital newspaper in Annapolis, MD: