Opera Dragonfly

We’ve got a couple of announcments related to Opera Dragonfly today. The first piece of news is that Opera Dragonfly alpha 3 has just been released. The main focus of this release has been fixing reported bugs, to make the user experience more pleasant. We’ve also added localisation support—which was introduced in the previous weekly release. The German translation is ready, and we are working on other locales, that will be pushed live as they are completed and QA'd. We hope this will make Opera Dragonfly more useful in the none-English speaking world. Obviously markets where Opera is more popular have high priority, such as Russian and Indonesian.

One of the key new features of Opera Dragonfly alpha 3 is DOM editing support. There is two modes. The first mode allows you to edit, add and delete attributes and text nodes in real time. You can activate this by double clicking on a attribute, value or text node. The second mode allows you to do free form editing, such as adding new DOM node. You can activate this by double clicking on the opening or closing tag of a element. This will turn the entire element and its children into a free form text field. There is currently a known issue with the first mode, where focus doesn't leave the editing mode when pressing the enter/return key. This will be silently updated as soon as it is fixed.

The other main new feature is that the breadcrumb trail has been updated. Now each node acts like a button, so you can navigate the element hierarchy more easily.

The next release will be Opera Dragonfly alpha 4, which is under heavy development. This has been under development at the same time as alpha 3, as it requires new features found in the Scope module that is part of the upcoming Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine. It will refine the user experience some what, as the currently active tab will be detected. This will tidy up the layout and make the docked mode much more logical to navigate. It will also introduce a HTTP inspector.

The way experimental releases are handled has also changed. Now instead of switching to the path for weekly releases, Opera Dragonfly will detect if you are on a stable release version of Opera or a pre-released version, such as an alpha, beta, or weekly release. If you are using a stable release it will use the latest official release of Opera Dragonfly (currently alpha 3). If you are using a pre-released version of Opera it will automatically updated to the latest experimental version of Opera Dragonfly. It is possible to force the use of a stable or experimental version. This is explained in the URL Schema document.

In further Opera Dragonfly news, we now have a person who is focusing on Project Management for Opera Dragonfly. I’ve been handling Product Management, but the Project Manager role has been vacant. The new Project Manager is Arve Bersvendsen, whom many of you may know already. He will bring a great deal of experience and knowledge into the project. I’ll let him introduce himself further in this blog when we have some more news to tell. For now, have fun playing with the latest release.

We've just released the Release Candidate for Opera Dragonfly alpha 2. New features added since the initial alpha include auto-complete for the Command Line (including object inspection), docked window mode, CSS editing including auto-complete, and a downloadable debug menu. There has also been many bug fixes and stability improvements.

Support for editing and a single window mode have been two of the three most requested features for Opera Dragonfly. The third was HTTP inspection, but this requires Core support to expose the required information through Scope, and will require the next version of our Core rendering engine. Alpha 2 will debut experimental support for the first two features.

Currently only CSS editing is supported, but much of the code can be reused for DOM editing for alpha 3. CSS can currently be edited by clicking on a property or value in the styles sidebar. User defined values are editable, but not the browser default values. Pressing tab will move to the next token (and shift-tab for the previous token). Pressing the up or down arrows on the keyboard activates auto-complete, that will cycle through the valid values. Typing co then the down arrow when a property is highlighted will suggest color for example. Pressing the up or down arrow on a value will increase or decrease the value. All changes are live and instant, so it is incredibly useful for testing tweaks and colour or size changes. I find it very useful when using HSL colour values for example, to get the exact shade I want to use. When at the end of a line or when the value is highlighted, pressing return will create a new property.

The docked window mode is now default, but can be changed to a separate window by pressing the icon next to the close button in the top right corner of the Opera Dragonfly UI. The UI for the docked mode is still very experimental as the support came at the end of the Opera 9.5 development phase. The UI will be improved to make it less confusing in alpha 3.

Command Line auto-complete has already been mentioned in this blog, and can be activated by pressing the tab key. If an object is returned it is highlighted and can be clicked on. Doing this will allow the object to be inspected in the Inspection sidebar. A debug menu has also been released to complement Opera Dragonfly, which currently packages existing Opera features that are useful to developers, along with links to reference materials and validators. This will be improved upon in the future to add new functionality. It can be downloaded on the Opera Dragonfly web site.

Once alpha 2 is released there will be a break while the lead developer takes a much deserved holiday, then work will resume on Opera Dragonfly alpha 3. This should include more bug fixes, DOM editing, support for localisation, UI work and more.

You can test out the release candidate of alpha 2 by entering https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly into the Developer Tools URL of opera:config and pressing the save button. Please give us feedback in the usual places.

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.