Demonstro

It has taken me almost a year, but now it is starting to look awesome. I think there are quite a pile of bugs yet to fix, but I simply cannot hold this back any more now. The skin is inspired by the Internet Channel of the Nintendo Wii, but adopted to fit the desktop. Among things needed to be done, was to create new icons. All together, some 250 unique icons were made, and this has taken some time.

Replacing icons reveals some funky cheats used in the default skin, and anticipate my icons not working 100% in all contexts. Some icons are reused a number of places, and if the new icon does not have the same ambiguity as the default one weirdness probably will occur.

A default Opera setup should work nice with this skin, but please make sure that the "Panel Toggle" is active. (Tools - Appearance - Panels - Panel Toggle checbox). Also, I recommend enabling the "Personal Bar" and showing images only (View - Toolbars - Personal Bar, right click on the Personal Bar - Customize - Style - Images only).

Enough talk, click the image to get to the real deal. And please leave a comment. Cheerio!

Being a big fan of Opera, but hating our logo is frustrating. To let off steam, I tend to play with it and sometimes the results are interesting. Here's a late take:



I quite like the simplicity of it, allthough the white outer line probably isn't the best idea. Unless the background comes with it, of course. Hm.

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

After a long and painful wait on my behalf, the 'Internet Channel' on Nintendo Wii is out in its final version. It really is a great browser, and I'm extremely proud to have been a part of it.

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After having played a bit with the widget logo in 3d, I wanted to do some painting again. It's been quite a while since the last time I used my Wacom (in fact it had a nasty layer of dust all over it when I pulled it out), so I wanted to do something fairly easy to begin with. The idea came as a conglomerate of wanting to paint fire (I recently participated in a discussion on how to do so on a forum) and try to make something out of one the best features in Opera. The combination of Balrog meets mouse gestures is the result:



Balrogs don't use mouse gestures, so it's here translated to a whip. Hopefully this fantastic piece of art will get lots and lots of people to start using mouse gestures. More probably lots and lots of people will not. Their loss. Unless they use keyboard shortcuts, but that I really doubt.