Everything is Permuted

I finally got to use Opera Mini on a phone today. A pretty basic Nokia 3510i landed in my hands and I thought, well I might as well try it. I downloaded Opera Mini (the lo-fi version), and within a minute or two I was up and running. Rendering was more than adequate for checking out sites, and once I'd figured out that you use the 'call' key for triggering links (I'm generally hopeless with phones), navigation was straightforward as well.

Natch, the rendering can't match what Opera Mini can deliver on my Palm T|C. That's truly stunning as you can see here, but given the basic limitations of the Nokia I was very impressed:


I'm also playing around with the latest version of Documents to Go on the Palm. Version 8 reads native pdf files. Previously there was a clunky - and basically unsatisfactory - adobe conversion routine that generated a pseudo-pdf file for the Palm. There was considerable loss of detail, and very poor treatment of embedded material. Plus it required a desk-top conversion and hot-sync to get the file on to the handheld. It worked, but only just and I very rarely bothered to use it. Now I can just open real pdf's that are emailed in. They look great, render really well, and on the T|C open at a very decent speed (faster than my desktop by some distance!).

So a bit of a techie day all told... until I saw who was waiting outside the back door tonight.

I'm not alone in having spent the past few days getting to grips with the preview release of Opera 9. The change-log alone is worth looking at, and certainly some of the very basic improvements such as highlighting all the search results for 'find in page' are an immediate plus. The main changes though are in the background and promise even better and more accurate browsing. In the short term though, using the preview version loses some functionality (unless you want to tweak). The user-determined site spoofing via the ua.ini is now done differently (so I would need to set those up again), and there are some regressions with newsfeeds and auto-reload functions. That said, I've been hammering it pretty hard today and haven't run into any problems. There's fierce debates on the beta forum about some of the changes, such as bookmark highlighting in the address bar (horrid if you have a minimal amount of space for addresses) and the remapping of keyboard short-cuts. But that's the point of a preview. These things will get worked out through hard testing and user feedback.

The other news is that there's now a beta version of an updated OperaMini. Currently it's restricted to Nordic countries, and I've not spotted any 'leaked' versions for a Palm as yet so I'll make do with version 1 (which did do the rounds). So I'm deeply jealous, as I'd love to give the update a run out. The promise is of a world-wide release in the foreseeable future. In case you don't know, OperaMini real web-browsing over any java-enabled mobile phone. Which counts me out... as my mobile is too lite/old even for that.

Finally, here's a truly terrible photo, which probably won't show as anything at all if you have a darkish screen. It should be ok on a bright flat-screen. It's a game called "Spot the Fox". No prizes for the correct answer though... (there are two foxes in the picture).