lachblog

It's been quite a while since I did skin work myself. To celebrate the upcoming release of Opera 11.10 Barracuda and it's shiny improved Speed Dial I decided I'd give my install a visual makeover to have a lighter overall appearance. Every once in a while (about once a year) I take a look at the minimalistic User Interface of Chrome and so this skin has Chrome'ish tabs, its lighter unified title bar and dimensionless buttons until you hover them. It also sports a more mac'ish sidebar as e.g. for the mail panel.

That aside I tried to preserve as much of the native mac look of Opera as possible, so all the buttons, icons and hover effects come from either the Mac Native or Opera Standard skin with only slight modifications. This should make the skin somewhat robust and compatible. It especially fails at tab stacking, though, and I invite everybody to improve that if needed. I also used the dark tab thumbnail tooltips that Darklink88 proposed.

This is how my Opera currently looks:

If you want to get the same look or play with the files you can get them here:

• Skin: http://www.demuths.de/iopera/files/skins/test/radskinc.zip (Note: The skin is for MacOpera only)
• Speed Dial background: http://www.demuths.de/iopera/files/speeddial_bckg/radoperabg.png
• Toolbar setup: http://www.demuths.de/iopera/files/toolbars/iOperad.ini

My server delivers them with the correct MIME types, so the skin and toolbar set-up can be applied with a single left click.

Here are the first pictures of our newborn ducklings, let's hope not too many of them will meet cats too soon. As soon as they are three months old they grow too big for cats around here. Currently there are seven of those sweet feather balls.

Finally I came around to uploading some new photos, first our exceptional summer holidays in Croatia. During our stay we made a one day trip to Venice, a beautiful town! Look what I found on a building right next to the Rialto Bridge:



This is the sign on the building:



And even some more Opera:

When this picture of Charlotte and my mother showed in my random stream I had to post it.

Yesterday I learnt via Opera Tips that it's super easy to enable something like Click to Flash in Opera 10.50 Alpha: Just open this link in your Opera opera:config#UserPrefs, set the checkmark for Enable On Demand Plugin and save the changes at the bottom of the settings block.

On every page you load afterwards (no re-start required) embedded plugins are replaced by a Play icon, only after clicking on that icon the plugin content is loaded. I enabled this today in my install and gave it a try and so far I like it very much. It also came to my mind that it would be fun to let this look like what Mobile Safari on the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad does, replace plugin content with a blue Lego cube:



Turns out one can even do this since the missing plugin icon is a SVG image inside the Opera.app package. I quickly drew an Opera-style cube and replaced the original icon, again Opera used it without a re-start. If you want to use or modify it I have prepared a ZIP archive that contains my SVG images. It also includes a matching missing plugins hover icon but it seems that one is not yet used by Opera:

missingpluginsvgs.zip

In order to use them, open your Opera 10.50 Opera.app package in the Finder and go to Resources/extra, backup the original two files, then replace them with my two graphics from the ZIP archive. This has to be repeated after each Opera upgrade.

Haavard:
H.264 is royalty-free for Web use through 2015, but still not a good idea I really hope that HTML5 video is done right and not linked to patented codecs that sooner or later will cost licensing fees! Btw, trying out MyOpera sharing. Can't really call it re-tweeting, is this re-my-opering or what?!? Seems to work nice, though