OperaBook

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I think Opera is already a very useful power tool to get access to WWW and email and I'm looking forward to Opera being improved even further with Kestrel and Peregrine. My wishes will be more imaginative for a future that might be a bit more far away (although I wished to already have this features, well, I dream of it).

1. Save & monitor text in form-fields

Autosave (at least on demand) text-input on webpages to Opera notes (automatically into a subfolder related to the URL) as the instant letter by letter saving is just genius. This should probably be saved together with an offline version of the page. Offer to track changes (replies to your input, esp. useful for posts, comments etc.) on the page - one difficulty would be to define the correct landing page, so probably it is much easier to implement and the same time more powerful for the user to separate saving and tracking and make tracking available for any page. The tracking result could be displayed as custom RSS feeds (even for pages that don't provide them). As it would be nice to organize this by date&time just integrate it as one viewpoint of the new calendar I trust in the Opera people to make it work together very clever.
Note: similar tracking (not saving) functionality is provided by online services like co.mments and coComment.

2. Sophisticated control of add-ons

Implement integrity information for all customizations like especially Widgets and userJS and maybe even Skins, CustomButtons, settings etc. For userJS and Widgets this could be realized by required tags at the beginning of the code (maybe together with hash codes of the used files if it's critical for security). For customized buttons and other settings there could be an online-check instead: the users can upload one or several files with the user applied configuration and there could be syntax checks etc. which returns information about the status of this (this could also be used to check the required tags of userJS and Widgets). For all the add-ons the user would get a status like o.k. / depreciated / update available / security risk etc. - as you can see this would be greatly complemented by automatic updates for this parts. Furthermore if this files could be saved (online or offline) it would offer the capability to synchronize and transfer settings (and even something like preferences sessions). To make it complete there should / could be a control mechanism to select which parts should be uploaded, exported or imported (together with the preferences session management this control panel could be used as something like an userJS&more manager). Well, this sounds well connected for me but reading it again I do not really know what this would look like.

3. Unified service and support on Opera.com

Put all things you can download to customize Opera on one subdomain of Opera.com and call them Add-Ons or Extensions (do not differentiate between the technical means in presentation and search but just focus on the needs or benefits for the user). Equally unify and improve the documentation (www.opera.com/support/, help.opera.com/, www.opera.com/docs/ etc.) - yes, I know, it is already improving. An official FAQ should be really simple to do - even a bad one could answer a lot of questions many new users will have (as Opera actually is looking for new users). Tips could make the browser more interesting and the features better known (just think about 30 days to become an Opera lover). Additionally deliver a more complete documentation (including change logs) for developers of skins, buttons etc. - it is a shame that Opera fans have to document changes and reverse engineer (hack) the possibilities of Opera's GUI-API (AllActions), Skin (AdvancedSkinGuide) etc.
The target of all this should be to provide user oriented support and service with unified starting points for new users, normal and advanced users and developers. Each of this has to be split up for different platforms desktop, mobile, mini and devices. I think this proposal should be refined although I'd wish the main point would be realized: one collection for all support and help stuff and one collection for all add-ons.

4. Magic UI

I have the idea to use the magic power of CORE2 Presto (the forthcoming rendering engine of Opera) to provide the visible parts of the user interface. This should make it quite a bit easier and faster to adopt Opera to run on any device (for the Opera developers). It is the idea of Opera Platform aka Opera Widgets applied to the Opera Browser itself. And there is already an interesting concept with Wiiminder enhancing the UI of the Wii and also a Webrowser panel by Shoust allowing you to browse in a panel. The functionality is still limited due to the limitation by Opera's great security concept. I'd think it should be relatively easy to add some parent nodes to the DOM tree delivering access to the new browser elements. I do not know whether it is possible to make the used (XHTML+CSS+JS) code completly accessible for customizations, which would provide the possibility to generate "real" extensions (powered by JS and WebStandards) and to completely exchange the chromeless chrome (funny, isn't it?). One possibility to have this in the real world would be a Second UI or Web UI which could be provided additionally besides QUICK - while Quick would serve as standard on Desktop the Web UI would bring the power to the devices and deliver the ability to completely tweak Opera on desktop, where a switch is needed to toggle the chrome on/off. Maybe it is even possible to bind native UI elements from the OS to the Second UI for those asking for better integration in some special environments like MacOSX or GTK. Although I think this idea is more than just a nice thought it will require lots of thoughtful inspection and huge amount of initial work for the developers.

5. Customizable and better UI defaults for Opera Mobile for WM

Yet another wish about UI, now towards another great browser: Opera Mobile for Windows Mobile. I'd wish Opera would make benefit from the possibilities that already are there. You can switch to another skin pretty easy but yet there is nothing to download and no place provided to make the community provide a skin (except hidden in the forum). This is simple. And it would make Opera Mobile more interesting and outstanding. As I am more interested in functionality I'd even more wish to have some menu.ini providing the possibility to have my own customized menus with the functionality I mostly use provided with fewer clicks. There could be also different setups provided by Opera. For one of it I'd wish better default menus and keyboard shortcuts for Pocket PCs empowered with a touch screen and non spatial navigation (Opera Mobile feels pretty optimized for phones with a keyboard). At best there should be a much easier and quicker access to toggle such important settings like drag+scroll and spatial navigation.



I'll not tag 5x5 but only 5 people - all of them Opera users as I'm not yet active on a different blog topic:
Blinkybill (Australia)
Friedrich (Germany)
Gerður Jónsdóttir aka MediumGeek (Norway)
Grafio (Poland)
Jan Standal aka Think (Far north)