Slightly ajar

The new year is upon us, and what better way to start it than to create a wish list for the upcoming year. These will be mostly related to Opera, but also some in regards to web standards in general. These don't relate to any inside knowledge at all, and are just personal wishes.

Change the toilet seat

I'm running Opera here on my brother's PC (My Mac laptop died a sorry death on new years eve), on XP and the logo isn't so bad due to the icons on XP being so tiny and low resolution. It is a different matter entirely on OS X though, which is magnified more on Leopard, with the new dock that gives a shadow of the shadow, and a reflection of the reflection. Not to mention a reflection of the shadow and a shadow of the reflection. A icon probably needs to be more detailed, but as a logo mark how about a perfect circle, a red ring? Rings and circles have a lot of positive symbolism, are very recognisable, and are geometrically pure and minimal. A ring is also used in Japanese (a strong market for Opera) as the symbol for yes or correct, just as a tick is fin the West (while a tick means incorrect in Japan).

Promote our roots and heritage

Opera is both Scandinavian, and European. Being Scandinavian has one big disadvantage; the cost of doing business and the wages are high due to the cost of living, taxes etc. It does have big benefits though. Scandinavia is known for its technical inovation (as is Opera), with the likes of SonyEricsson, Nokia (ignoring the fact that Scandinavians would term Finland as Nordic and not Scandianvian), Saab and Volvo. That means there are many people with great technical ability here, and just as many close by in the rest of Europe. Arguably though Scandinavia is more famous for its design. Bang & Olufsen is the stand out name in terms of electronics, but there are many more from the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, home furnishings, music and so on. Names such as Ikea, H & M, and Absolut (whose bottle is a design icon) are probably house hold names around the world. And who didn't play with Lego when they were a kid? Of course, Europe as a whole is famous for its design or high quality goods. From Germany with its cars, to Italy with Fashion, Switzerland with watches an France with its wine and cheese. Did I also mention the Scandinavian women?

In some ways we are already moving in this direction. If you look at our feature list, it can often be described as maximilism instead, of the Scandinavian minimilism of its most famous design movement. But we've got some great new designers, that are doing some fantastic work, and we've recently worked with the photographer of Moods of Norway for the images on our new B2B section of the Opera web site. You'll even notice one of their founders in some of the photos. They're a small but up and coming fashion label that are very popular here in Norway, and stars like Gwen Stefani are fans.

I'd love to see us work closer with these kind of companies and creative people, and also come up with a design aesthetic of our own, which is both uniquly ours, but pays homage to our heritage, and design excellence of the region.

Deliver to top quality partners

In 2007 Opera delivered products to some of the biggest names. Nintendo, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Sony are just a small example. One partner I'd love Opera to have is the aformentioned B&O. It wouldn't do anythnig for our market share, as they ship low quantity, high cost items, but the combined innovation potential of both companies combined would be quite exciting. I can think of some great control methods we could do with their new programable, touch screen remote, and I can imagine they'd create a great minimalist interface. We also have the technology so that we could be included in their entire range, from TVs, to mobiles, landlines, music systems and even their car projects.

I'd also love to do something more experimental. Car manufacturers often create prototypes for the big car shows. I'd love to see Opera create a prototype browser for a company such as Saab, that shows how a browser could be integrated into a car, and even control the entertainment system and other systems. Being a prototype, it wouldn't have to be even functional, just design ideas. Opera has already shipped in aircraft seats, so there is no reason why it couldn't be included in cars too, especially with our voice control technology.

Opera Labs

Speaking of prototypes, we have a fairly new labs site. During the year we released a number of experimental builds, such as advanced SVG, canvas and video builds. It would be great to use this site more to show some of the crazy technology we are working on, and realease things like prototypes and experiemnts that perhaps couldn't be included in our flagship products. Experimenting with different interface styles for instance.

Faster, Safer, more Standards

We are probably industry leading in all these areas, but there is no reason why we can't improve even further. There is certain CSS3 properties that I'd love to see, and HTML5 has some interesting features. It would be nice to see core pieces of each spec ready, and implemented by the major browsers, by the the end of the year. It isn't possible for all of the spec, but in CSS3's case, it could include a couple of modules such as Backgrounds & Borders and Media Queries for example.

Developer tools

It is no secret we are building real developer tools. It will be difficult to rival the likes of Firebug instantly, as they've had years of development. We are commited to making good quality tools however and to improve them as they mature. I hope they ease issues with developing for Opera, and help improve our compatibility rate. Hopefully we can deliver some of that Opera innovation to the developer tool space.

The one true web to rule them all

There is a feeling in the air that we are in the mist of the beginning of another great browser war. Lets hope the Web wins this time, instead developers moving from the Web to alternative one vendor controlled technologies such as Air and Silverlight. It certainly looks that way with all the Silverlight sponsorship and booths they've been doing at Web conferences recently. Far more than promoting IE IMHO. I'd love MS to commit to adding to IE any feature that exists in Silverlight, or is planned to be, and is included in a Web standards, in a reasonably similar time frame. If Silverlight gets much more features for developers to use than IE, then it is natural developers will start looking at the shiny new toy. Silverlight is a nice rival to Flash, in a one vendor solution rival to another in the plug-in space, but if it becomes a rival to the web, then that is scary for everyone, except Microsoft. Ditto with Air.

I want the Web to win in '08 and not any commercial interest from either player.