Out of the way

I was there for a meeting, and for the Xtech conference. The conference seems to get more expensive each year, which is something of a shame. I gave a 20/20 talk (20 slides, each one for a maximum of 20 seconds) where for about 5 of my slides I did a demo instead. It was about Dragonfly, the new developer tool, and the really cool new bit of it (which is how it can connect to another browser via scope to debug remotely). And the demo worked, despite having to install it all on someone else's computer.

I also spent a little time wandering around before my flight home, trying to look at cultural stuff. A group of us went to see the book of Kells in Trinity College Library. But the day was set for Trinity College's Ball (a noise incredible was just tuning up the sound system) so the library closed early.

Instead the most touristy thing we saw was the Christ Church Cathedral - on a very old church site, the official seat of the Anglican church in Ireland, where William of Orange prayed after his victory and where the Strongbow tomb is apparently not the original, but a replacement that was only put in 6 or 7 hundred years ago. There is now a big dent in the top of his head - apparently this is what people sealed deals on, or at least some people.

There's a lot to see in Dublin, besides the ceilidh. I don't get there often, but I would like to.

We also launched Opera Dragonfly while I was there. It's quite a cool approach to developer tools. Although what you see as a user (especially with the alpha release) is a standard high-quality debugger (scripts, DOM, CSS, etc), it has a particularly cool aspect, called Scope.

Scope is what dragonfly looks at to find out what is happening with the page. And Opera will have Scope in upcoming releases. It is an API, that the user can open, so you can debug remotely. I.e. I can set my dragonfly to run on a very stable version of Opera, and get a random developer build, and then I can debug the page as running in the new build, but from my stable release. Or I can run scope in Opera mobile, and debug a real genuine mobile application running live on a real genuine mobile device, all from the comfort of my OLPC with Opera installed.

The other interesting thing we released is called fileIO - I will write more about it later, but basically until now Web applications have either had no access to files (which is safe but restrictive) or lots of access (which is incredibly dangerous). This is a middle ground that provides a safety layer to make applications more powerful without just giving away the farm. Hopefully this will make it to a W3C standard, working in whatever your favourite browser is, so you can use the cool applications without the risk of someone taking over your machine.

And the first reviews came in for the HTC Diamond - the most exciting phone I have seen Opera on so far. I want one!