Following on our Opera Mini 5 beta launch, we've just announced the release of another mobile browser — this time it's Opera Mobile 10 beta for Symbian. While they both feature a similar redesigned UI, Opera Mobile 10 makes the most of your smartphone's capabilities, featuring a full JavaScript and layout engine.
Naturally there are many improvements for mobile surfers to enjoy, but what will be of particular interest to developers are the enhancements to Presto, our rendering engine. Not only is it much faster than the previous incarnation of Opera Mobile, but you may also be impressed at its standards support. You can read more about Opera Mobile 10 from a developer's perspective over at dev.opera.
In addition there is one more feature aimed at developers that we're particularly proud of and that is the ability to remotely debug a web page on your mobile phone using Opera Dragonfly on your desktop. Put more simply, as you edit the web page's code on your desktop, its display is dynamically updated on your mobile phone. The process is as follows:
(Desktop): Make a note of your local IP address and fire up Dragonfly.
(Desktop): Enable remote debug in Settings and click Apply then OK in the pop-up dialog box.
(Mobile): Open opera:debug, enter your desktop's IP address and click Connect then OK in the pop-up dialog box.
(Desktop): Click OK in the pop-up dialog box to download the new version of Dragonfly, then click OK.
(Mobile): Click Connect again in opera:debug, then click OK in the pop-up dialog box.
(Mobile): Open the web page you want to debug, ideally in a new tab.
(Desktop): Select the site to debug in Dragonfly and edit the HTML and CSS to your heart's content.
We've made a short video to show remote debugging in action with captions for people that suffer from deafness/limited hearing (or if you just want to watch it without disturbing those around you). Furthermore, the captions are also available in English, Japanese and Russian.
I presented at Over the Air last week, a two day hack focusing on widgets and the mobile web. It was a great end to an already busy stretch of conferences with a day of presentations followed by an all night hack and presentations the next day.
It was all about widgets and a heavy emphasis on web standards and the buzz was around who could build the best widget in a number of categories ranging from best Doctor Who hack to location aware hack. You can check out the competition winners on the Over the Air blog.
It was good to be able to show the potential of widgets for all users and just how easy Opera widgets are to build with plain old HTML, CSS and XML - no added programing languages needed. I demoed how to build, test and deploy a widget using our widget emulator and Opera Dragonfly for remote debugging.
Below is the presentation which is also available in the following formats:
With great pleasure I can announce that we have released the Scope protocol specification, which is used in Opera Dragonfly and some of our internal QA tools. Currently Opera Dragonfly uses the STP/0 version, but for future version of Opera we will switch to the STP/1 version, which all new clients are recommended to use.
One of the reasons to release this documentation is that we hope that other browsers and users agents will be interested in adopting Scope in their products. If this is the case, we’d like to standardise the specification through a standards body, so that there will be one standard way for tools to interact with the browser. Having this would allow any developer tools to work with any browser that implements the specification. This would be great not just for debugging tools like Opera Dragonfly and Firebug, but also IDEs and QA tools.
One of the key design decisions for Scope was to make sure it works well when debugging remote devices, such as a mobile phone or TV. Debugging on a device is difficult, due to limited screen size, resolution or input method. Scope allows you to connect your device to a computer running a Scope-enabled tool, so you can debug directly from the computer. Since we started work on Scope, both Apple and Mozilla have released, or are in the process of releasing a mobile browser, and Google has come on the scene with a desktop and mobile browser of there own. Being able to debug remotely is likely now important functionality for them as well.
I was fortunate enough to get invited to speak about Accessibility testing tips and tools at Sussex University recently courtesy of Dr Graham McAllister.
I met with a great bunch of students who were all really enthusiastic not just about accessible web design but also accessible gaming and virtual worlds. I even managed to sit in to the end of a presentation given by a couple of guys on accessible gaming which was really interesting - ever heard of Wii-hab anyone? Eye-opening stuff. I also had a long chat with Sarah Lewthwaite who introduced her research into Facebook and accessibility in a lecture that followed mine
I thought I'd post my slides here for you to have a look through. They give an overview of testing methodologies as well as point to some tools and some examples of how to test images, heading structure, keyboard accessibility and so on. I've added in links and references where possible so that it can work as a stand alone tutorial but if you do have a question let me know.
Today saw the release of Opera Dragonfly alpha 3. As it is based on web technology, you don't have to do anything—it will just update itself the next time you load it. Key new features are DOM editing, localisation, and improved breadcrumb trail. Full details can be found at the Opera Dragonfly blog.
object not found error?
If you get an error using Opera Dragonfly saying "object not found", it's a confusion between versions. By default, if you're running a stable build of Opera, it tries to use the latest stable version of Opera Dragonfly, while running a pre-release of Opera (alpha, beta or a weekly) tries to connect to the latest experimental version of Opera Dragonfly. Sometimes this can get confused.
To cure it, update <URL:opera:config#DeveloperTools|DeveloperToolsURL> to either of these:
WIDGETIZE