So I installed the first beta of Opera 10 yesterday, and I have to say it's outstandingly great. It's so much faster, in pretty much every way I can measure without, you know, measuring anything.
Facebook is now totally usable, instead of being laggy and slow under the weight of all its javascript. Pages that have been open for weeks load instantly when I check them, instead of grinding on the harddrive for 30 seconds, dredging up old cached images. My 25,000 newsfeed entries can be searched in 1-2 seconds instead of 20-30. It's really outstanding.
There are some bugs: I still can't press ENTER to start a new search after editing the search terms on Google. This started a few weeks ago, breaking the behaviour on Opera 9, but is still broken. It's annoying.
The biggest problem seems to be clicking links in feeds. Almost 100% of the time, the target page will load partially and stop, requiring a manual refresh to make it load completely.
The dictionary seems to be wickedly out of date, and doesn't recognize words like internet or URL.
When you change the behaviour of your address and progress bar, you can easily get the address bar to half-disappear as it shifts too low at the bottom of the screen (I prefer it there, instead of at the top).
Before I turned off all the buttons (I prefer the keyboard for navigation) the skin looked really nice. The tabs especially were very pretty for the 5 minutes I let them live before, again, removing all that fluff from my screen. =)
I love Opera, the browser and the company fill me with warm thoughts. 10 is a remarkable improvement to an incredible product. Good work, Opera team!
I feel bad about not posting more here, especially having been member of the week soon after joining. Fact is I've been busy with several of my own sites, but I still have a strong love for MyOpera and the great people here.
Recently I've been doing some fun game-related things.
-> I made this Arcade Font Engine allowing you to create your own images using over 100 8x8 pixel fonts ripped from old arcade games. It was mentioned recently in German magazine GEE.
-> I wrote an article on CRTs and LCD screens which was featured on Kotaku, Engadget, Gizmodo and a lot of other sites, and it will be appearing in the UK Xbox 360 magazine soon.
-> I've been playing Nintendo's brilliant Yoshi's Island on SNES (note the cool new background here =) and I've been trying new things with the beautiful graphics.
I'll try and come back to MyOpera more often, if I do or see anything interesting.
If you'd like to keep tabs on my activities, you can try my forums, twitter or friendfeed. (I don't want to look like I'm spamming or leaving MyOpera, so I won't link them here. You can ask me if you want them).
Also: Sooo excited about Opera 10. Is it out yet? Is it out yet? How about now?
My neighbor's a gruff old man with a soft spot for cats. He had about ten of 'em or so, but the city came 'round a few times and I haven't seen more than a couple for about a month...
Until today, when I found that the pregnant stray had dropped a litter in my back yard.
Five little kittens, that all look the same. Two have opened their eyes, one is about half way, and the last two haven't quite figured that part out yet.
The other day I discovered the magic of Inkscape, a free open-source vector graphic editor. It's really quite good, and I've been spending some time getting used to its controls, and converting some of my older vector art. In the process, I've discovered that it's easy to put SVG content into your webpages, and unless they're using Internet Explorer, your viewers can easily benefit.
While learning more about SVG, I discovered a few interesting things:
1. Despite their easily scaled nature, there doesn't seem to be any easy way to change the image size in a page. If I say width="300", the actual SVG image is still full size, but appears in a 300-pixel window. That's annoying.
2. Opera doesn't render the SVGs as nicely as Inkscape. Sure, inkscape is an advanced SVG creation utility and has features that Opera doesn't support, but Opera doesn't even render circles correctly all the time. CIRCLES. =/
3. The text in an SVG can be highlighted and copied, just like any other text in an HTML page. That's pretty cool!
4. The correct way to include an SVG image in a page is with the OBJECT tag:
As part of my ongoing journey of photographic discovery, I found myself becoming more and more limited by my D70s camera.
Actually that's a lie, I could do what I wanted with it, but I was desperately eager to get some new hardware. I had settled on Nikon's stunning D300, and was just about to get it when they announced the D700. It's Nikon's 2nd-best camera at the moment, and it's got something I have wanted for a long time: a full-frame sensor. Full frame changes a lot of things, but it offers two things I really wanted: quality and width.
Quality: I won't bore you with the technical details, but a side effect of making things smaller is decreasing the quality. The D700's larger sensor means that each light-collecting element is larger, and the end result is a camera with better final output than a comparable camera with a smaller sensor. If you know anything about digital cameras you'll know that high-ISO images tend to be very noisy, with lots of visible grain and coloured spots. The D70s did not produce pleasing images above ISO 800, and maxed out at ISO 1600. The D700 offers better results at an astonishing 3200 ISO than the D70s did at 800! Check out this 100% crop of ISO 3200 on the D700.
Width: For simple reasons of geometry, the D700 makes all my lenses 'wider'. Most DSLR users know to multiply their lens by a 'crop factor' to get the effective width. A 50mm lens on the D70s was effectively a 75mm, which I found annoyingly narrow. On the full-frame D700 it's actually 50mm, which is a very useful length. My Tokina 10-17mm Fisheye lens was as wide at 17mm on the D700 as it was at 10mm on the D70s!!
It's got a magnesium alloy body instead of plastic, it has a faster framerate (8fps instead of 3.5), a larger viewfinder and a billion other sexy features besides. It wasn't cheap though: it set me back some 265,000円.
Now that I've paid for and received it I can't shake the feeling that it's a better camera than I am a photographer. It has so many new or different features that I'm having a hard time making pictures as good as I was with the D70s... But it's only four days old, and my fervent hope is that this new camera will allow me to do bigger and better things once I learn the new rules.
Google's announced their new browser, 'Chrome', which should be released in 24 hours.
I can't help but wonder why Google thought it would be easier to create their own browser than work with the browsers already out there. Opera's standards-compliant, but lots of Google's pages work poorly with it, and they're typically not interested in fixing it.
So, if they can't be bothered to fix their pages, what on earth makes them trustworthy enough to design the whole browser?
Oh well, we'll see I guess. I'm not in a hurry to use a different browser, and apparently I'm not alone: Opera's doing quite well according to the latest reports. =)
While working on the new site I was taking pics of some game controllers. I've been meaning to do this for a while now, and I'm very pleased to report that my plans are coming together perfectly.
I set up a mini studio in the hallway, featuring a plank of styrofoam, two remote flashes, and a couple of plastic bits I found lying around to create some mini softboxes.
Check it out:
There's a stiff piece of translucent plastic foam on the left, in front of the SB-800, and a soft padded bag attached to the SB-28 on the right. When the lights fire, both plastic baffles light up as if their entire surface is emitting light, creating a very appealing glow without the harsh specular highlighting you normally get from a flash.
So the Segway, which never really did cause the pedestrian revolution they hoped for, has found a market. Security forces in China and, it turns out, Japan, are using it. For what, I don't know: standing around all day is harder than walking, IMO, and these guys will run a lot faster than a Segway will roll... But hey, whatever. Money to burn and all that.
But check it out: heavy duty or what? The Japanese guy (right image, left rider) has GUN PLATFORMS!
And those Chinese guys on the left... Do they ride around like that, balancing precariously, guns drawn? It's like some sort of circus-act for the armed and ridiculous.
WIDGETIZE
