Slightly ajar

Since the previous post, I've updated the Opera market share map somewhat. Now instead of having an automatically playing list of data, you can access the data by hovering over the specific country, and the country in question will also highlight.

For the country highlight I used mouse events on the country’s path element. I added a set element as a child of the path element which changes the class attribute to active. To add the mouse events, I added the code begin="mouseover" end="mouseout", which is fairly self-explanatory. For displaying the market share data it is slightly more complicated, as I wanted the action to happen on a different element to the active element – in this case the text elements. This also isn't too difficult when you know how. On the set and animate elements used by the text elements, I also used mouse events, but had to say which element triggers the animation. In the case of Belarus, I used code such as begin="by.mouseover" end="by.mouseout" which says to begin the animation when the element with the ID by has a mouse over event and ends when the same element has a mouse out event. I chain a number of animations. The first (where the code sample is from) is a set element to set the visibility of the text element, and the next two are animate elements to fade in and fade out the text element by changing the opacity value. You can chain as many of the different animation elements as you'd like. If you are wondering what the difference is between set and animate, set only changes the value once and happens without interpolation (i.e. is on or off, black or white), while with animate, there can be a series of value changes and it animates between the values (so opacity 0 to 1 will animate through each step from 0 to 1, instead of fully transparent to fully opaque).

As well as changing the interaction, I also compressed the file using GZip and changed the extension to svgz. This reduces the file size and tells the browser to decompress the file before passing it to the SVG engine for rendering. Many web servers may not be set up to handle svgz files (so the browser will get confused), so you may have to add the HTTP Header to your configuration file. In Apache I did this using the following instructions. This allows Opera and Safari to know the data is GZip compressed, but doesn't seem to work for Firefox at the moment. I'm not 100% sure why yet.

[DEMO] Opera Eastern/Central Europe market share map in SVG.

Now that my team at Opera is growing bigger, and includes active bloggers, we’ve decided to create a team blog, where we can have a unified team voice, instead of developers have to follow a multitude of different blogs at different corners of the Web. This is one of the first public parts of our planned Opera Developers Network, or ODIN as we affectionately call it for short. As well as the team blog, we will have our own corner of Opera.com, to tie together developer related products and activities.

I’ll continue to blog here, but haven’t fully decided how to split between blogging here and on the team blog. As our efforts in the Developer Relations team ramps up, we have a number of things to cover already. Dev Opera and Opera Labs have been up and running for a while now, Open the Web is going from strength to strength, and the Web Standards Curriculum and our flagship developer tool Opera Dragonfly are just getting started. ODIN will bring together all these products and services along with covering developer focused events, relevant news coverage in the blog, and all the information you as developers need on our Core rendering engine, Opera technologies and industry standards. We hope the resources we provide will make it easier than ever to support Opera in your web sites and applications, and we can be as helpful as possible when you have issues you can’t work out how to fix.

We've just released a public build of our testing and development build that shows Opera passing 100/100 in the DOM tests. It also has pixel perfect rendering. The final test which has to be passed is the performance test. This puts Safari and Opera neck and neck in the race to be the first browser to pass Acid 3. I'd like to congratulate the Core Opera team for all the work they've done to pass the first two tests so quickly, and the WebKit team for making this a fun race so far. Both engines getting this far means that we both support important CSS3 properties like HSLA color model and Web Fonts, and pushes support for SVG forward. I'm looking forward to when Gecko and the new IE engine get this far.

Swedish fashion labels have been hot recently, but Norwegian label, Moods of Norway are now joining them on the global scene. It was Oslo Fashion Week recently, and I was lucky enough to be invited to the VIP section of their fashion show at Bislett Stadium (venue of the 1952 Winter Olympics). There was reportedly around three thousand people there. It was certainly packed in the VIP section, and the whose who of Norwegian celebrities were there. Unfortunately, I didn't recognise any of them, so sorry if I stood on anyone famous' toe.

Moods and Opera have been up to a few things together recently. If you look around the Opera web site, you'll find one of the Moods founders in some of the photos. They're also doing a fashion show at our Rock Opera event at SxSW on the 10^th March. In one of the most enthusiastic display of blogging I've ever seen, they are like a rabbit out of the hatch with their blogging on My Opera. Their posts are as humorous as their advertising copy, and they seem to travel around the globe even more than I do. My favourite quote being I dont' know! The pink boat is almost so gay that it scares the gay dudes. Their pink boat is certainly very pink! The girls are less scary though.

It is a quite good fit that they are attending our Rock Opera event. While their normal clothes are popular over here, for some of their designs you'd have to be a rock star to get away with wearing it. Either that, or like to attract attention. It is probably no secret why then, that throughout their My Opera blog, you can see such stars as Dave Navarro (Red Hot Chilipeppers), Justin Timberlake (no accounting for musical taste), Tommy Lee, Perry Farrell (Jane's Addiction), some guy from the Black Eyed Peas, and Frank Zappa's so, wearing Moods of Norway gear. I'm looking forward to Jon Von Tetzchner sporting one of their nice floral numbers.

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.