My Opera Interviews

My Opera member DrLaunch has become very active in the last months, creating an impressive group devoted to people who are interested in all things technical, and trying his hand at creating some impressive new skins for use within My Opera. We managed to have a quick chat with the good doctor.

Would you like to introduce yourself to the My Opera Community?

Hi! I'm DrLaunch. I'm 19 years old and from Norway. I'm also known as Remi when I'm offline. I'm a hobby graphical designer, aspiring independent web developer and a technology lunatic.

How did you discover the Opera Community, and what made you join?

I was a Firefox user and saw a story about the new Opera Mini in a online news site. I downloaded it to my phone but I encountered some connection problems. I turned to Opera Community for support. I managed to solve the problem my self though. But thanks to me joining I found out that Opera Community is great! So here I am.

Your username is great! Are you a real Doctor? What's its significance?

Thank you. No. I'm not really a doctor. My username is taken from a cartoon character I thought up, Dr. Launch. Dr. Launch is from Qeba-9 in the Andromeda galaxy. He has several doctorates and does space vessel launches mainly. I feel closely connected with Dr. Launch. A lot of my personality is in Dr. Launch. I hope my user name also gives people an idea about what kind of person I am.

I love your blog - it's a great mix of technology and creativity. You appear to be talented in a wide number of areas - do you have a favourite passion?

Thank you very much. I do love creating and to make things that mean something to others. I try to do a little bit of everything because that's more fun. When it comes to creation, designing is my main passion.

You state on your blog that you love being a part of the My Opera Community. What particular aspects appeal to you the most?

Yeah. I love the community. It might be the best community on the web! The most appealing thing about it is all the great people here. But let's not forget the blogs, photo albums, forums, groups and all the other features. Opera Software has done a great job with the community. In fact, being an Opera user is not the only reason to sign up. Anyone should experience this great community.

What impresses you most about Opera in general?

Opera is the greatest piece of software I've used. What's impressive is the features and speed. It keeps getting better all the time too. Opera is one of my big passions.

Your group, #techie has certainly taken off (I've found it to be a great help ). What is the history behind the creation of this group?

It's great that you found #techie helpful . I started the group a long time ago to be a place for people interested in various technology related subjects. I also started it because I love helping and I'm working with computers. The idea is that every member should contribute. No matter if they're a moderator or not. "I am because of what we all are". This means we're all the same and we grow from helping eachother. I started it at the same time as the #techie chat room on OperaNet. Making that chat room active was really a hard task. But Anzah made a kind comment on my blog and I discovered that he's really a great person. He's interested in technology like me so I invited him to the group and the chat room. Now he's an operator in the chat room, and a moderator in the group. In order to attract more people we started giving the blog content. Anzah linked to most of his blog posts in the blog and I wrote some new tech related blog posts. We even collaborated on one of them. Thanks to becoming a featured group, we have some more activity now. But the chat room is still not very active, even though things are getting better. That's a pity because it's a great part of the community, both for discussion and help.

What can we expect in the future from the group?

More tech related blog posts by both of us, more blog activity, more help in the forums and more. We're also looking for moderators that want to contribute by blogging, moderating the forum and help out in the chat room on OperaNet.

You're obviously very artistic. Is this what prompted you to start creating My Opera skins?

Thanks for noticing. I started making my first theme because I thought my blog needed some personality and because I wanted to learn CSS. I also love to create things.

What's your reasoning behind your second group, DrLBlogDesign? How would you like to see that progress?

I wanted to make more themes and share my work. I also wanted to keep my main blog design clean all the time. So I started the group to develop, test, and share my My Opera page themes. Now I can keep unfinished designs away from my blog too! Installing a theme from the group is very easy. There are previews and installation instructions in the albums. I hope people want to visit the albums regularly, give feedback and rate themes.

And to finish, some questions about your experiences with My Opera so far...

What blogs do you have spotlighted? Any particular favourites?

I've spotlighted many blogs. More than just 15. So I keep missing a spotlight archive where I can find my old spotlights. Some of my current favourites are Hello World by Zomg, Computer 101 by RJ, Missing Pieces by Anzah and Random Accesses by Kevin Chilton.

You have some great photos in your albums. Have any others around the community stood out?

Thank you. I do enjoy taking photos and sharing them. Gildor recently started using the community to share photos. I really enjoyed this album a lot! As my memory is really bad I had to look at my own spotlights. But since I know no way to see my older spotlights, that's all the albums I could tell you about.

On a technological aspect, what improvements would you like to see made to the community, if any?

Opera Community should have one centralized, easy to use place for all Opera modifications including custom buttons, bookmarklets and user js. Finding these modifications now are a little difficult because they're shattered all over the web, in the forums, OperaWiki.info, HowToCreate.co.uk and many other places. I believe Opera is the most customizable browser. But it gets overshadowed by extensions for other browsers. Opera needs to stand up and show that it's better! Also in the area of customization. The spotlight feature in the community needs an archive to go with it. I like to spotlight new things. But I don't want to forget the old things I've spotlighted. Having an archive would help a lot!

Since you joined the community, what have been your high points and low points?

Some of my high points are all the great people in the community. All the things I've learned here. The great work done by Opera Software on the community and that I've had the chance to experience it all. It's also wonderful to see that Opera Software cares about its community and users. I think there aren't really any significant low points.

And finally...

There are many famous Doctors (Dr Watson, Dr Dolittle, Dr Zoidberg, and Dr Who to name a few). Do you have a favourite Doctor?

My favourite doctor must be Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers movies. He's eccentric and funny. A great doctor! And he turns out to be nice in the end.

Would you like to add anything?

Opera Community is critical for Opera to gain more users. Opera Community members should be active in other communities and take a little bit of the community with them. That way, Opera's trademark will spread and what probably is the best browser will gain more users. Opera Software should not only promote Opera, but the community too! Opera Community might have the power to help doubtful users of other browsers switch.