Slightly ajar

No not Kestrel (had you there), but Opera 9.5 SDK. The SDK was announced at CES in Las Vegas. The Opera SDK is the cornerstone of Opera's offerings for devices. It allows for easy development of a browser for the many platforms that it supports out of the box, using our GOGI abstraction layer technology. As expected it supports some pretty amazing things.

The biggest inclusion for web developers is the inclusion of Core-2. The Internet Channel (on Wii) and Opera Mini 4 included earlier versions of Core-2, but this includes all the advancements made since those releases, to make Presto Core-2 the rendering engine it is today. You can download the latest weekly Kestrel releases to get an approximation of the engine, as they should be very similar. This includes HTML4, partial HTML5 (including Web Forms 2 and Canvas), CSS1, CSS2.1 (very close to full support of the current recommendation), partial CSS3, DOM1, DOM2, partial DOM3, SVG Basic 1.1, partial SVG 1.2, XSLT 1, XPath 1, ECMAScript 2 & 3, Widgets 1.0 etc.

For those of you that like to develop Widgets, the same widgets that work on Opera Desktop and Nintendo Wii will also work here. They should also work on Joost software too.

One advancement that is important on the small screen is Opera Zoom beta. This is basically what is in Opera Mini 4 and will be in Opera Mobile 9, and similar to what debuted in the Wii (which was out before iPhone, so no it is not a copy of that). This allows users to browse the web on a small screen without the need to reformat the page. For eye candy lovers, there are visual effects, to make zooming and such look much better. For those that prefer single column mode, that is still included as an option.

There is no mention of it anywhere, but I assume Opera Link is in there somewhere too. Another important addition is Flash Lite 3, to allow sites like YouTube to be displayed.

One thing that I'm excited about that is included is WebUI. This allows GUIs to be created using regular web technology, instead of normal platform specific APIs. This makes UI development not only more portable, but cheaper, quicker and has a much bigger pool of people that can develop for it. Any web developer can basically start making UIs quickly. As the UI is made for the device, and not the web at large, there is no need to worry about IE rendering bugs or missing standards support. The full arsenal of Opera Core-2's standards support is available. There is no better excuse to learn SVG or CSS3. Things like buttons can be made fully scalable with SVG, and regular HTML text that screen readers can access (providing a screen reader exists for the device in question). As Opera adds further support for CSS3 like border-radius and box-shadow this becomes even more excing and easy. With the advanced standards support available it is not that difficult to make advanced GUIs that can even look like native desktop applications.

The only confusing thing for me is the release date. Opera 9.5 Kestrel is not out yet, and thus when it dos come out, it will have different standards support and bugs to the 9.5 SDK (most likely). This will mke it more difficult for developers as there will be differences in rendering when making use of things that differ. This is quite unfortunate. I also hope the CSS3 nav-* properties have been included, as they make Spatial Navigation (important on devices without a mouse) easier to define by the developer, and in a standards based way.

For more information on the Opera 9.5 SDK, take a look at the product sheet (PDF)