photo of Henrik Helmers

Under construction

The exciting life of a UI designer

Who am I?

Saturday, November 20, 2010 8:42:10 AM

It has been quite a while sine I wrote something on My Opera, so most of you probably don't remember me. I work as a UI designer in the still fairly young Opera UxG (User Experience and Graphics) team. After finishing my master thesis I decided to join Opera full-time, and started working full time as a graphics designer. When the UxG was formed I joined, and went from working on Widgets and B2B projects to working on desktop products.

Lately, I have been working on the design of Opera Dragonfly and some of the features that (hopefully) will go into Opera 11. I have also been helping out with overall UI maintenance, especially on OS X.

We are still looking for more designers to fill the ranks, so if you you are skilled and friendly come join us!

Under constructionUpdating drop-down toolbars

Comments

MRCS Thursday, December 2, 2010 4:04:16 AM

Jan, I saw your name on one of the doc pages. I've tried many, many, many things to solve this, in addition to forums, documentation pages, google, etc., and I am only turning to you personally as a last resort. I was able to put borders around the buttons on my toolbar with no problem, except those with checkboxes inside. It seems as though Opera treats Checkbox type buttons differently than other types of buttons. Is it possible to put borders around checkbox buttons (not the checkboxes themselves)? If you could just point me in the right direction, I'm more than glad to do the work.

Henrik HelmersHelmers Thursday, December 2, 2010 3:55:27 PM

Checkboxes in the UI are native elements on most platforms, and I am not entirely sure how skinable they are. In CSS the styling is a little different, you can style the background and border of the box, and the checkmark itself can be styled with color.

One of our interaction designers told me yesterday that he would like to get rid of these "radio shack" buttons in toolbars and replace them with something better. Who knows. :}

MRCS Thursday, December 2, 2010 4:46:04 PM

Thank you very much for your reply.

I had pretty much come to the conclusion that it's not possible. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't some peculiarity I didn't know about. (CSS won't do it either, as far as I can tell.)

XP Pro SP3 x86

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