Opera Developer News

A great feature of Opera Desktop is customization. Through the many different settings, you can pimp your surf. Some users have gone to great lengths configuring Opera as a defacto browser for residents of their country, or speakers of their language. Today we introduce one of them.

Jedi Lin from Taiwan has written a 4-part article about his experience of building a customized Opera desktop package. The articles take you all the way from the planning stage, through coding and configuration, up to documentation and community planning.

The first article is the planning of Opera Nalakuvara - a customized package for Taiwan users. In this article, the author discusses subtle differences from the norm in the preferences of Taiwanese users, and shows changes he made to better serve them. For example, he changed the default UI font from SimSun (better suited for the Simplified Chinese used in Mainland China) to MingLiu, which looks better when used for the Traditional Chinese spoken in Taiwan.

The second article is about tweaking Opera's default settings, for example opera:config and search engine and mail settings.

The third article revolves around the third party components and menus of Nalakuvara. This includes configuring User CSS, User JavaScript and Java applets. One interesting feature is the addition of support for telnet protocols ssh:// and telnet:// using the ZTerm Applet.

Packaging, testing, documentation and community support are discussed in the fourth and final article. The author discusses how he tested different packages on different platforms using virtual machines, and how he dealt with user feedback and building a community around his custom Opera.

There are currently ten packages available for various systems including Windows, Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, and generic Linux), FreeBSD and Mac OS X. For more information, you might want to visit the Nalakuvara project page, or even try out Nalakuvara if you read Chinese.