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Slightly ajar

Opening the web, one site at a time.

Posts tagged with "2008"

2008 wishlist

Friday, 4. January 2008, 21:22:58

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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.

10 Comments

Happy New Year

Monday, 31. December 2007, 23:37:13

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Happy new year everyone. May 2008 be a year when there is great progress with web standards such as CSS3 and HTML5, where we make great strides with cross browser compatibility and getting authors to use accepted standards, and maybe even Opera upgrading to a new bug tracking system (ok, world peace may come before the last one :wink:).

It's my aim to eradicate the best viewed in… message. A relic of the last browser wars, which lingers in ever some of the most high profile places. Google Docs was the latest high profile site to remove theirs. Hopefully Spreadsheets and Presently will give us a late Christmas gift, along with the full version of Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail (or whatever it is called these days).

2008 should be a great year for Opera. Mini is going from strength to strength as the most popular Mobile browser, even after all the competitors hype. Opera Mobile is looking exciting and should move over to Core 2 in '08. Kestrel (9.5) is coming along nicely and will no doubt be out some time in the not too distant future.

The advancement and maturation of Core 2 is looking very promising. It is only getting faster, leaner, more secure and more standards compliant. I truly believe it is industry leading in all those areas. I often think of it like a hand tuned sports engine, and the jewel in Opera's crown. I'm personally following the progress of CSS3 closely, and as these specs improve, I expect to see our support improve even further than it is now. Web Fonts is one such are that clearly interests our CTO. Our HTML5 support is also very good, and something that isn't noticed too much. I'd advise anyone that is interested in the future of the web to take some of our HTML5 features for a spin. Web Forms and Server-Sent Events are a couple of things I've mentioned before that don't need too much explanation before realising how useful they can be. I'm also looking forward to our Mac build of our labs release of Opera with Video and Audio support in both HTML and SVG.

It is no end of year message without a bold prediction. I predicted this year would be the year mobile took off, and that has been true to some extent. Opera mini has improved greatly, and its market take up, with very little promotion or advertising, has been remarkable. The was also a little Apple device that took the world (USA) by storm. I'll go out on a limb and say this year could be the one where SVG gets the push it needs and starts making inroads. Now for this to happen it needs industry wide implementation. Again, opera has industry leading support. Unfortunately we don't have the market share to push these things. Mozilla have support in their Firefox browser, but I'm nt sure how far they've advanced recently. Apple has support in Safari 3, and I don't think it will be too long before they follow Opera and have it working within CSS. The cog that is missing, is of course IE. I've no idea if they have added any sort of support in IE8, and this is one of the required pieces, especially with Adobe killing their plug-in once it wasn't strategically beneficial to them. One can probably implement SVG through Silverlight, although this wont help in the area which I find SVG the most useful; as a CSS background image. There is always ways to do rasterisation on the server though.

I don't think '08 will be a time when SVG rivals flash. The tools to create complex animated interfaces in SVG are just not there. And lets face it, most people won't want to do that by hand. But for vector style still images it is ideal. For simple shapes, symbols, gradients, translations and reflections it is ideal. Most of the aforementioned simple things, it is easy to do it by hand. I learnt those basics in a few hours hard study. For more complex images, the typical tool of graphic artists can be used, Adobe Illustrator. It doesn't produce the best output in the world, but at least it does export to SVG. From there the image can be kept as a vector for browsers that support it, and changed to a PNG for those that don't. There are great benefits, such as scriptibility via the DOM, scaleability (especially now we are slowly moving to resolution independence and browsers are catching up to Opera with the introduction of full page zooming instead of just text zoom), and page weight (Don't forget that SVG can be zipped and served as SVGZ for even further size reductions). page weight is getting less important due to the proliferation of broadband, but there are still many areas where dial up is relied on, saving server bandwidth is also still a great plus on your pocket. The mobilisation of the web also means we have to think about those on a slow connection, as anyone that has used AT&T Edge will testify.

I hope you all have a great new year, and have great celebrations over the next hour, or whenever it is your new year. The life of a web opener is never done, so I'm off to get some work done. I'll speak to you next year.

4 Comments