Tweak

Mitchman, Opera developer, explains some of the new toys for tweakers in Kestrel. It will be interesting see what new shortcuts and buttons will be made with the 'delay' action.

For those of you who've switched to using web-based mail, it might not be intuitive how to use links with "mailto:" URLs. You'll have to change the handling of mailto-links, to pass the address to a webmail service, instead of a mail application on your computer.

In Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Programs, select 'mailto' and press 'Edit'. Then use the command lines below to put in the 'Other application' field:

Note: for Opera 9.5, you need to enter the URL parameter in the parameter field.

GMail

opera "http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&to=%t&su=%s&body=%m&cc=%c&bcc=%b&ui=1"

Hotmail

opera "http://hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/compose?To=%t&Subject=%s&Body=%m&Cc=%c&mailto=1"

Yahoo Mail

opera "http://compose.mail.yahoo.com/?To=%t&Subject=%s&Body=%m&Cc=%c"

Netscape Mail

opera "http://webmail.netscape.com/compose.adp?mailto=%t&mailcc=%c&mailsubject=%s&mailbody=%m"

Mail.com

opera "http://mail01.mail.com/scripts/mail/Outblaze.mail?composeto=%t&subject=%s&body=%m&cc=%c&compose=1"

Opera Web Mail

opera "http://mymail.operamail.com/scripts/mail/Outblaze.mail?compose=1&did=1&a=1&to=%t&subject=%s&body=%m&cc=%c"

Horde

opera "http://YOUR_HordeURL_HERE.com/horde/imp/compose.php?popup=0&to=%t&cc=%c&msg=%m&subject=%s"

Squirrelmail

opera "http://YOUR_SquirrelURL_HERE.com/src/compose.php?send_to=%t&subject=%s&body=%m&send_to_cc=%c"

Generic

opera "http://YOUR_URL_HERE/?To_Field=%t&Subject_Field=%s&Body_Field=%m&Cc_FLield=%c"

Test: mailto-link
Button: toggle between M2 and webmail - in theory at least, this makes my Opera 9 crashy...

The image shows the analog clock you can get from the Widgets download page for Opera 9. The clock comes with three skins, which can be consecutively activated by left-clicking the clock. The one on the right has two little tweaks, done by editing the contents of the widget zip file.

Removing the text is very easy, this is directly taken out of the html file. Activating the fourth (hidden) skin for the clock requires a little bit more, but should also be easy enough for the tweakers among us to figure out. This transparent skin makes is much nicer to keep the clock 'pinned' without really obscuring your normal windows.

Note: I had some trouble taking a screenshot, so this is actually two (parts of) screenshots pasted clumsely together.

About changing the column order in Opera's 'tree' views. It is a rather hidden feature, that you can choose which columns to show in views like the mail messages list and the download manager. Right-click on any column header, and you can select the columns. You can also change the width of columns by dragging the divider between the columns. All this requires the mouse BTW. Note that, as opposed to the standard Windows list control, it is not possible to make the columns occupy more (or less) than 100% of the available horizontal width. After adjusting the column widths with the mouse and closing Opera, the Preferences file (see 'Help > About Opera' for it's location) will contain a line that defines which columns are shown, with which width, and in which order. The line in the Preferences file looks like this:

[Columns]
Mail View=0, 25600, 1, 1, 28091, 1, 2, 93822, 1, 3, 22216, 1, 4, 13770, 1, 5, 51200, 1, 6, 21298, 1

You see 7 triplets of numbers here. First is the column id, second the width and third the on/off bit. You can change the order of these triplets to move the columns around. Column numbers: 0: Status, 1: From, 2: Subject, 3: Sent, 4: Size, 5: Attachment, 6: Label So by changing the line to, for example, this:

Mail View=0, 25600, 1, 5, 51200, 1, 1, 33773, 1, 2, 88400, 1, 3, 22146, 1, 4, 13656, 1, 6, 21223, 1

... the Attachment column will be shown after the Status column. Don't worry about the column sizes when editing, Opera will make it fit.

Finally! The opera6.ini documentation has been updated for Opera 8. As the old docs where valid for Opera 5 only, this is great news. No more searching in a gazillion changelogs to find newly added entries, etc. Thanks to Jorunn and Nafmo!

As a bonus, there is also an updated and improved sysadmin handbook (with for example info on 'fixed' ini settings) and command line switches for Opera for Linux and Opera for Windows.

Add a 'BlogThis!' button, for those with a Blogger.com account. Select a quote from a web page and press your new button to get a blog compose window. In Opera 8 beta 2, you can finally use the layout buttons for Bold and Italic (though they insert the markup for STRONG and EM strangely enough) etc in the compose window.

It's a bit hard to add a clickable button link to a Journal post, so I'll redirect you to my buttons webpage to pick it up:

<http://people.opera.com/rijk/opera/dndbuttons.html>

A commom question in the newsgroups is: "Why is the link/visited link color in I set in 'My Link Style...' (see the Page Style preferences) ignored on most pages?" The same question can be asked about your choice for 'strike through' and/or 'underline'.

The link style is the base style you choose for links, always to be overriden by author styling when you allow author styling. So if the page sets a color for links and visited links (using a stylesheet or html attributes), Opera's settings will be ignored. And if the page stylesheet sets a value for 'text-decoration' (underline, no underline, strike-through, blink), Opera's setting for undeline and strike-though will be ignored.

If you want your preferred link style to be applied all the time, you need to use a 'User style sheet' and use the '!important' marker in it to make your styles override all author styles.

Example of such an user style sheet, just copy to a plain text file:


a:link {
color: #0000ff !important;
background-color: #ffffff !important;
text-decoration: underline !important;
}

a:visited {
color: #ff00ff !important;
background-color: #ffffff !important;
text-decoration: line-through !important;
}


To see your user stylesheet applied on top of author styling, enable it in the 'Author' presentation mode, like this:



But having you own link colors applied all the time is usually very ugly when visiting sites with a dark background.

Personally I'd use only this in my user stylesheet:


a:visited {
text-decoration: line-through !important;
}


... because it never interferes with the color scheme of sites.

A copy of search.ini gets stored in the profile directory, because different users can have different visible searches on the Personal bar. Opera will overwrite the complete search.ini file in your profile directory when it feels an update is needed (based on the version number in the file BTW, if you preemptively set it to 100 you will probably be save for some years!), but it will always create a backup 'search.bak' in the profile directory when this happens.

Why would Opera ever overwrite the search.ini file? Because for example Ebay changed the search link it wants us to use again, and the previous one stopped working...

For those hurt by the latest change, this is the right URL for Ebay searches that search.ini should have:

http://www.qksrv.net/click-1458483-5463217?loc=http%3A//search.ebay.com/search/search.dll%3Fcgiurl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fcgi.ebay.com%252Fws%252F%26krd%3D1%26from%3DR8%26MfcISAPICommand%3DGetResult%26ht%3D1%26SortProperty%3DMetaEndSort%26query%3D%s

And why does Opera make a backup? Because some people like to tinker with their search.ini file, something still not officially supported by Opera

I don't know if there are still limitations in what you can place in which order, I didn't found them recently when editing my own search.ini. Things to keep in mind though w.r.t. numbering:

- [Search Engine 9] will be used on the default 'View bar' in Opera 8, and is meant to be the 'Find in page' entry.
- [Search Engine 1] and [Search Engine 2] will both be called when you use the 'Super search' (not defined anymore in the latest search.ini, but you can still add it)
- [Search Engine 1]-[Search Engine 8] will be shown as buttons in the Search panel
- [Search Engine 1]-[Search Engine 16] will be available as draggable fields in the 'Customize toolbars' dialog.

Edit 2007-04-21: outdated, doesn't work in Opera 9. Use this userscript instead.

Entrepid Opera user Fabian has created this very cool Flash-blocker. In involves nothing more than adding a few lines to your user stylesheet:

embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"] {content:"Flash"; outline: 1px dotted gray; color: gray; background: black}
embed[type="application/x-shockwave-flash"].zichtbaar {content: normal; outline: none}

body:before {
position: absolute; visibility: hidden;
background-image: url("javascript:(function(){window.onclick=function(){var srcElem=window.event.srcElement;var tag=srcElem.tagName;if(tag=='EMBED') srcElem.className='zichtbaar'};})()");
content:""}

This will replace Flash movies with a black area with the word Flash on it, and clicking on the area will play the Flash movie. Depending on the HTML code of the page, the replacement block might collapse dimensions. This blocker will only block display, it wil not block loading the Flash, so on clicking the Flash immediately starts playing.

Get the code from this zip to be sure you are not fooled by linebreaks:
<http://my.opera.com/forums/attachment.php?postid=744450>

Maybe I should write something about the easiest way to work with custom stylesheets. Later!

The 7.60 preview is out, and should preferably be getting a clean install on your system when you want to test it. It is just a preview, after all. But for the tweakers here...

If you want to reuse your setup files made for 7.5x, you'll have to change a few things to take advantage of the new features. So below you'll find all the changes in the setup files since 7.5x.

• Toolbars: the Voice button was added to the address bar and main bar. Only relevant for Windows users BTW. You should be able to add the 'Voice' button to the toolbar of your choice from the 'Customize toolbars' dialog. The 'buttons and fields' repository and the 'Defaults' are taken from the standard_toolbar.ini, which will be updated by the upgrade. So the new button is available there, no tedious editing necessary. The only other changes in toolbar.ini were some minor localization changes.



• Keyboard shortcuts:
  The new keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F9 (stop speaking!) was actually already available in 7.5. If you have to add it to a custom keyboard setup, it looks like this:
  F9 ctrl = Cancel current voice (and it goes into the 'Application' section)
  
  Also added to 7.6, in the 'Button widget' section which hopefully no-one modifies:
  Enter shift = Click button
  Enter shift ctrl = Click button



• Menus:
  For those who have manually edited their menu file, they will have to to do some more edits now. New items are included in the menus in these sections:
  
  
  
  
  • Mark thread as read, in the [Mail Item Mark Menu] section:
    Item, 70126 = Mark thread as read
  
  
  
  • Kick with reason and Ban under [Chat User Control Menu]:
    Item, 70044= Chat command, 9
    Item, 70047= Chat command, 10
  
  
  
  • The new Medium screen mode aka 'Fit to width' is placed under the [Browser View Menu]:
    Item, 69482= Enable mediumscreen mode | Disable mediumscreen mode
  
  
  
  • The Voice console is placed under [Advanced Tools Menu]:
    Platform Windows-QNX, Item, 69312= Show Voice Console
  
  
  
  • And lastly there is a direct link to the Voice help under [Help Contents Menu]:
    Platform Windows-QNX, Item, "Voice"= Go to page, "opera:/help/voice.html"