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Opera Dragonfly

Bug control, accelerated

Posts tagged with "Opera Dragonfly"

First weekly build now live

By David Storey. Thursday, 22. May 2008, 15:56:32

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We have just released our first weekly build of Opera Dragonfly today. These are development snap shots and are not guaranteed to be stable, or even work at all. The weekly builds are released to get feedback and testing of the latest changes. If you'd like to report issues please go to the Opera Dragonfly feedback page.

Weekly snap shots will appear on the URL https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly and should automatically update when a new version comes out. The snapshots can be downloaded at http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly/zips/. The regular shipped url will update when official releases are updated.

There have been a number of bug fixes since the first alpha. A list can be found in the change logs. The most notable new features are Command Line completion and the Object Inspector. If you press the tab key when using the Command Line, it will auto-complete the first match. Pressing tab again will cycle through the matches. If you enter a command that returns a Object, you will be able to click on it and inspect the Object in the Object Inspector. This is located in a tab next to the Frame Inspector. Developing this functionality highlighted bugs in recent builds of the Opera Browser, so there are known issues with these features. Entries in the Object Inspector will not expand for example.

Progress is still on course for a second alpha release in the not too distant future. A desktop build will also be released soon that will fix the issues with Opera Dragonfly not working in offline mode, due to a bug with persistent cache not working over HTTPS. We're looking forward to you trying out this and subsequent weekly builds, and any feedback or bug reports that you send.

In somewhat related news, Opera also announced the launch of the Opera Widgets SDK this week. Opera Widgets can be debugged using Opera Dragonfly, and the SDK includes a useful Widgets Emulator for emulating how Widgets will look on different types of devices. Widgets currently work on devices such as the Nintendo Wii and ARCHOS, and upcoming UIQ 3.3 mobile phones. Widgets are currently Opera only, but we are standardising the spec at the W3C and will change our implementation to match the spec when it is finalised. We are also standardising the File I/O API spec at the W3C. This is a new API we have developed to access the file system, and is very useful for Widgets.

9 comments

Opera Dragonfly, One (and a bit) week in

By David Storey. Wednesday, 14. May 2008, 20:11:17

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Opera Dragonfly is just over a week old, and I think we can say the early signs are we had a successful launch. It was ready and launched on time, except some gremlins in the server which took a few minutes to sync the development version of the web site with the live site. We got a lot of coverage both in the media and on blogs. We made TechCrunch (and Washington Post), Wired, Digital Web and Ajaxian among others.

I've been trawling the Web for feedback, as part of our team meeting today, to discuss the Beta 1 roadmap. In general the feedback has been positive and understanding that the release was a first alpha. Much of the feedback for feature requests were already on our current roadmap, so I'm hopeful that by the time we hit final, we will have a very useful tool for Web developers. Speed has been a concern, but Opera Dragonfly isn't fully optimised yet, and improvements in Scope, which may come for Beta 1, should help. Currently JSON is not fully supported for everything in Scope, and we find that JSON is much faster currently than XML for communicating between Opera Dragonfly and Scope.

While responding to feedback in the Opera Dragonfly forums, I noticed my first (external) patch. Azamadt Smaguloff (from Kazakhstan) posted a patch on the forums to enable autocomplete in the Command Line. I've not had time to check how this works yet, but this feature is something I've noticed a few people have requested. I think it is fantastic the developers are already interested enough to add to Opera Dragonfly themselves. We don't current take in external check-ins into the official branch, but that doesn't mean we never will.

Things are currently on track for our second alpha, which should (all going well) include inline editing, infrastructure for localisation and bug fixes. Once editing works, that should make the CSS Inspector much more useful for designers.

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