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Opera Desktop Team

Widgets UI improvements!

By Huib Kleinhout. Friday, 24. March 2006, 17:08:55

Don't be shocked when you run this weekly build. The Widgets user interface has dramatically changed!
The first thing you will notice, is the Opera Widgets label on the top of your screen. It allows you to quickly pull up your widgets, from within any application.
The widgets are now shown in a faded background. This makes it easier to distinguish them from other applications. And more fun to use!

Can't find your favourite widget? Check the Opera Widgets Developers Documentation to see how you can make your own.

Changelog
  • New widget User interface:
  • Some of the new widget User interface is not yet available on Linux, UNIX, or Mac.
  • Widgets will not work on some Linux or UNIX installations, while work is being carried out on the new widget User interface.
  • Widget thumb is shown at the top of the screen, providing quick access to widgets (this can be removed using the settings button when viewing widgets).
  • Widgets are now displayed on a faded background.
  • Pinned widgets have their own tasks, and can be activated with Alt+Tab as with normal application windows.
  • Pinned widgets can be kept on top using the right-click menu.
  • New welcome mail to replace dialog when first creating a mail account.
  • History panel now uses localised time when grouping by date.
  • Optimised tooltip formatting to prevent long tooltips from causing Opera to become unresponsive.
  • Re-added gender setting to voice preferences.
  • Fix for display of toolbar button text.
  • Content blocker now collapses blocked iframes.
  • Improved handing of image changes through CSS :hover effects.
  • Shift+Enter in forms is no longer detected as an unwanted pop-up.
  • Support PUT method for XMLHttpRequest.
  • Fixed support for LSSerializer.writeToURI.
  • Improved support for HTML output in XSLT.

Windows specific:
  • MSI installer can now download the Windows Installer if it is not yet installed on the system.

UNIX specific:
  • Fix for downloading files to desktop.
  • A static build is available again.

And many other fixes!



Download links:






In memory of Geir Ivarsøy

about:installerMacBuild 3295 Crash on startup solution

Comments

Mark Gillespie 24. March 2006, 19:22

Darn, MSI installer just trashed all my settings... Need to mess around in INI file, to sort the mess out..

Ah well, all the fun of beta testing I suppose...

Michael Thompson 24. March 2006, 19:25

For me. This is by far the best version yet. All the bugs I had are fixed.

Alexis Deveria 24. March 2006, 19:26

Hmm, everything went fine for about an hour on my Mac, then something caused it to crash and it crashes again every time I restart it. Also, I'm too lazy to reboot.

klosek 24. March 2006, 19:27

Java doesn't work with Opera again. It doesn't work since version 8246 :frown:

Karl-Johan Sjögren 24. March 2006, 19:30

Well it loaded from the wrong place but it saved to the right so now it seems like it has written it over since I closed Opera between the times I check here :frown:

Haavard 24. March 2006, 19:31

alsiladka, the site needs to stop blocking Opera from using the rich text editor.

klosek, please try to be more specific when reporting problems. It is rather difficult to guess what you mean by "doesn't work".

Sgt_Hobo 24. March 2006, 19:31

Originally posted by non-troppo:
Request: the pinned widget icon in the default skin should be made less intrusive!!!

+1 and even further - if pinned and topped - no icon at all!



Super big happy +1 time!

cybot 24. March 2006, 19:32

@mgillespie,LordDaimos

Just reinstall it with the classic installer and all your settings are restored.

I had the same problem with the MSI because it changed the installation from single user to multi user without asking, so all preference directories were wrong.

Alexis Deveria 24. March 2006, 19:35

Oh! I remember the site I was on when it crashed. It was somewhere on the new Internet Explorer Feedback site.

Of course, visiting it using Opera9WB/Mac was probably just asking for trouble...

Numen 24. March 2006, 19:41

It seems that one must restart Opera after chaning the voice from male to female or vice versa to be able to hear it...

Some tabs are blank after restart with continue from last time. Doesn't always happen.

vampjon 24. March 2006, 19:45

Used 'alien' to convert an rpm to a deb. Seems to work fine.

Andrzej 24. March 2006, 19:46

This widget thumb looks horrible. It should be deactivated by default and movable. How can I remove this?

RevolusWorld 24. March 2006, 19:51

Everything seems to work.
I installed Opera with the MSI.

Haavard 24. March 2006, 19:51

Read the announcement, andyas :smile:

At least if you are using Windows...

gilb 24. March 2006, 19:56

great job !!

Numen 24. March 2006, 19:58

Clicking a link in widgets launches new Opera widnow, not a tab. Shouldn't it respect and follow tab preferences?

Carlos Renato F. Vendramini 24. March 2006, 19:59

I'm using Slackware Linux Current. Opera, seems to work ok. Only at startup, this release is a little more slow and the processor goes until near 100% during few seconds. This behavior wasn't present in the previous release.

One thing which I can't understand is what happen when I start Opera through the wrapper placed by the installer under /usr/bin. If I type "opera" then I receive segmentation fault. Now, if I start Opera using the binary placed at /usr/lib/opera/$VERSION/, then all works fine, except by the fact that Opera doesn't load any applet Java, that is, following this "method" to start Opera, the workaround related with some Java libraries that is present inside the cited wrapper has no effect obviously, since I'm not using the wrapper to initialize Opera.

Andrzej 24. March 2006, 19:59

Haavard: I've read it. Where is the settings button? When I press F6 only Pin/Add/Remove are clickable.

EDIT:
I'm using Linux.

Stefan Steinecke 24. March 2006, 20:01

Make widgets-thingie removeable, please. Make it an option.

Ramūnas 24. March 2006, 20:02

Wont there be deb packages at all? Or they just got delayed?

Numen 24. March 2006, 20:03

@Phantom _of_The_Opera

From the changelog:
Widget thumb is shown at the top of the screen, providing quick access to widgets (this can be removed using the settings button when viewing widgets)

Chloran Forest 24. March 2006, 20:04

The OSX version crashes immediately after opening, cannot find what out why.

Markus 24. March 2006, 20:14

@Numen, haavard:

Please, be so kind and tell us where the "Settings Button" is! If I click on that thing, everything goes gray (the "widget space"), but there is no settings button nowhere at all!

Thank you.


Edit: btw, I just noticed: submitting a comment brings me back to the first page of them. Is that supposed to be?

PatentEater 24. March 2006, 20:16

Originally posted by "haavard":

Works fine here.

Perhaps you could try to be slightly more specific about the problems you are experiencing? Preferably in the forum.



Will consider doing so. Thanks for paying attention.

antoxicion 24. March 2006, 20:21

Is there a way to hide a Pinned widget from the taskbar, i want the widget to show on my desktop while i browse but i dont want a tast showing up on the taskbar. Any clues?

Robert Błaut 24. March 2006, 20:21

Please , be so kind and tell us where the "Settings Button" is! If I click on that thing, everything goes gray (the "widget space"), but there is no settings button nowhere at all!

Click on a black arrow and uncheck show handle :wink:

JensusUT 24. March 2006, 20:22

...and again complete different string numbering in language file.
I think some open words are appropriated? My opinion is: You want to dry out the pool of inofficial translations in this way, and for this purpose you've written an internal number generator dicing all strings new.
No other conclusion is left. Nice work!

But why choosing this way? Give some straight words to the community! What's next? No more Keyboard-Setups? No menues?

And i bet, no one will answer, because it's open like a book...

Regards,

Jensus

Helena Červinková 24. March 2006, 20:22

OSX:
First time runnig: when reading rss, after deleting one message, opera window lost focus.
After removing one personal toolbars setting opera crashed for the fisrt time, then it crashed every time it was started.
Little experimentation and the reason for crashing was in my case newsfeeds. No news = no crashing. (tested also in blank profile)

Here is crash report generated for apple:
http://mix.lynn.cz/opera/crash.rtf

Stefan Steinecke 24. March 2006, 20:23

First you have to rightclick on the thingie.

Andrzej 24. March 2006, 20:24

Please , be so kind and tell us where the "Settings Button" is! If I click on that thing, everything goes gray (the "widget space"), but there is no settings button nowhere at all!


Click on a black arrow and uncheck show handle


Unfortunatelly it is not working in Linux.

EDIT:
Can you put it is 'Known issues'?

Kc4 the Great 24. March 2006, 20:26

downloading... will add more once installed

Numen 24. March 2006, 20:30

@JensusUT

Calm down mate, they did it to be able to add languages easier than before. More info and converter script on Peter's blog:
http://my.opera.com/nafmo/blog/show.dml/189902

Markus 24. March 2006, 20:32

@andyas: on Windows, I found it out:

you have to uncheck "show handle" and then exit via F6!


Other thing I don't like in Opera 9 general: resuming from last time will not load all windows from scratch like 8.x and before did. Instead it will redisplay the windows like they really were when closing Opera. Is this configurable?

Andrzej 24. March 2006, 20:34

@Scorpio75: Thanks, but it is not working in Linux.

Ben 24. March 2006, 20:35

I really like the widget space idea.
I've noted some redraw artifacts with some effects that widgets have, like alpha layer transparencies; they may be widget side problems, but they may not.
On another note, it seems to up opera's memory usage by quite a bit, it's nearly three times what it normally is, when I have widgets running, which doesn't affect computer performance on my machine, but it may become:
In previous versions of opera, it became unstable if it used similar amounts of memory.

Note:
mem usage: 189,756 K

Daniel Sitnik 24. March 2006, 20:39

Good work guys!
The MSI installer worked fine for me in the last version and continues like that. It preserved all my settings and customized searches.

I still have one problem with Image Switching. Almost everytime that I load a page for the first time Opera switches or duplicates some of the images. When I reload the page it shows the images in their proper places.

olli 24. March 2006, 20:43

danielcs: Are you on a wireless connection?

Haavard 24. March 2006, 20:47

Originally posted by JensusUT:

My opinion is: You want to dry out the pool of inofficial translations in this way, and for this purpose you've written an internal number generator dicing all strings new.
No other conclusion is left.


Actually, it's done to improve translation. Remember that you are basically using development snapshots here, and major changes can happen. If you cannot handle that, you should probably stick to previews, betas or even just final versions.

Why would we want to prevent unofficial translations?

Let's try to stay levelheaded here...

Originally posted by Scorpio75:

Other thing I don't like in Opera 9 general: resuming from last time will not load all windows from scratch like 8.x and before did. Instead it will redisplay the windows like they really were when closing Opera.


Opera 9 does the same as Opera 8 by default, actually.

Hylic 24. March 2006, 20:55

I installed it using the MSI installer, and selected upgrade, now apparently i still had a old (separate version) of opera installed, now it seems like it copied over (upgraded) the version i was using with the preferences of this separate version. So basically is there any way i can get my settings etc.

chesss 24. March 2006, 21:00

New welcome mail to replace dialog when first creating a mail account.

Finally!

Content blocker now collapses blocked iframes.

So does this mean that its not just filter.ini now, put a 'proper' ad-blocker,

Pekcxi 24. March 2006, 21:05

Where can I change paths, especially Preferences-path? Opera changed it from C:\Program Files\Opera\profile to C:\Documents and Settings\****\Application Data\Opera\Opera\profile. Please reply faaaasssstTTT!

Markus 24. March 2006, 21:06

@haavard:

I just checked: fired up 8.52, and it loaded all pages that I left open when shutting it down how they look at this particular moment.

On the other hand, if I start any version of 9, it displays the pages in the exact state I left them when closing it.

Could this be a problem of an always updated Opera until 8.52 and a clean install of 9? I mean: maybe my 8.52 does behave like an older version and the clean 9 does like it should? If so, I'd like to be able to set 9 to the old behaviour...

FS0903 24. March 2006, 21:06

- Installer doesn't schow "Run Opera when clicking finisched" at the end of the install process
- wrong profile will be used if you choose update in installer (profile in %APP_DATA% will be used, not from install dir)

Hylic 24. March 2006, 21:08

@Pekcxi
Opera:config

sandis 24. March 2006, 21:10

For me, not only applications are faded when in "widget screen" mode, but all widgets too - pinned, unpinned, just added.. So I can barely see them.. Any suggestions?

Hylic 24. March 2006, 21:12

@FS0903

If you hold down the mouse button over the finish button it will appear.

Kyle Baker 24. March 2006, 21:16

yay!

wupperbayer 24. March 2006, 21:24

@tamster:

Yes, I can confirm that. But only if your Widgets are not always on top.

@Opera devs: Great job! :smile: Now I like handeling widgets. Just three suggestions:

1. Make the "pinned" button invisible if the Widget isn't activated or even if the widget space is left, because it is clear that only pinned widgets will remain.

2. Rename "pinned" two "Show" or something like this because it's not logical that you have to pin them in order to see them when you leave widget space.

3. As mentioned above, only "always on top" widgets will not been greyed out. Suggestion: Make all widgets to stay on top when you switch to widget space.

Pekcxi 24. March 2006, 21:25

@Hylic
Yeah. Didn't work. I changed all paths. Saved. Restarted. The wrong paths are still there. Opera is f*cked up.

Arnt 24. March 2006, 21:27

First, great weekly! :up:

Please add an option to customize level of transparency in widgets space.

I don't like that a pinned and always on top widget is showing in taskbar. Maybe add a "Show in taskbar" in the widget popup menu below "Always on top"?

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