New updates, Single Sign On and more
By Cosimo Strepponecstrep. Thursday, March 31, 2011 1:29:42 AM
We've released new updates to My Opera very often since the last post, even if nobody is writing about them. In this case, I want to write about it, because I've been especially involved in the update that was rolled out live a few hours ago.
As usual, there's tons of changes. I'll mention the ones that I think have the most impact on our users.
Location-based timezones
If you go to your account settings (the "wrench" icon, then Account) in the Profile section, now you have a list of location-based timezone values, also called "Olson timezones" instead of the old "+0100", "-0400" values dropdown.
This allows us to adjust the displayed dates and times correctly when daylight savings time (DST) is in effect. Have you ever noticed the timestamps on My Opera were 1 hour off? That's why. Now the dates and times should be shown correctly. Also the activity feed items, even the ones coming from external services, should be displayed according to your timezone.
You can set the correct timezone for your account now! The initial value that will be selected could be slightly off. We tried to use some heuristics to correctly detect the location-based value from the previous offset-based, but it's not perfect. And some timezones like Asia/Kathmandu (+5:45), were not even there... :)
Single Sign On
Having a single sign on system throughout all Opera web sites has been a constant request from users for a long time, and something we've talked about for even longer time. We've rolled out a first milestone of our new Sso system a few months ago in "stealth mode". This release completes a second major milestone, with lots of bugs and small quirks fixed. If you had problems accessing My Opera with two different browsers, or you would be suddenly logged out after some inactivity period, we fixed all the known issues now. Sso is also used to implement persistent logins.
However, how useful is an Sso system with just one site where to log in? Pretty much useless in fact. The exciting news is that we've been working on a new awesome mail service currently in closed beta that is already integrated under Sso. And hopefully other major Opera services like Portal, Unite, Addons, etc... will join in soon.
Rename account wizard
Some of our services require special constraints on usernames. A valid Unite username must be part of a valid domain name (username.device.operaunite.com). The vast majority of you already have a valid username. For those who don't, we provide this wizard that helps them rename their account. This is now updated to handle the new username validity rules.
That's it for now. Soon there will be more news. Stay tuned! :)








