lachblog

Usually when I have a setup that works for me then I use it several years. Up to now I always had a setup in use where the Tab bar (Page Bar for Opera) is on top. However Khadgars brilliant new mac'ish icon set Entr'Acte 2.0 Beta inspired me to try something new (at least new to me). It has nice big icons included that need a Main Bar on top to look really good. So I hacked the skin to have tabs that come down from the main bar (similar to Safari but a bit more Opera-like; Khadgar, i hope it's ok that I promote my hacked version ) and played a bit with button placements to get rid of the mail toolbars. I use Opera's integrated mailer all the time and it always looked weird when there were even more toolbars below main bar and tab bar. That was the main reason why I kept my old setup.

So here's a preview of Entr'Adcte 2.0 with some explanatory texts. Some more pictures can be found in this Gallery.



If you want to test it yourself you can single-left-click on the following links to install the skin (MacOpera only!) and the Toolbar setup (every desktop Opera can use that one):

• Skin: http://demuths.macbay.de/iopera/files/skins/test/entr'adcte2unified.zip
  
• Toolbar setup: http://demuths.macbay.de/iopera/files/toolbars/iOperadUnified.ini
  

Of course the toolbar setup is not for the Opera newbie, In fact it's designed to exactly suit my needs. But if you like parts of it you can easily remove/add buttons to make it fit for you, too. Some explanations on the extra buttons:

• Back and Forward have hidden dropdowns with the navigation history; press and hold them to show the dropdown.
  
• The Forward button switches to FastForward when available. It also allows to log in on pages that are stored in the wand.
  
• The Home button is not the usual one, it links to the Navigation element "Home". So if a page has a Link rel="home" element you can jump to the front page easily (I use that on my private blog but a few other sites offer that aswell).
  
• The "Read Mail" button opens the unread view. The dropdown allows to access all mail accounts/filters/views without opening the mail panel.
  
• The Empty Trash button works from every toolbar not only from within the mail panel. I made it with the help from LarsKl. It jumps to the Trash, marks all messages, removes them and then jumps back to the unread view.
  
• The User/Author mode switch is useful on a couple of sites where I use a custom user.css to remove ads and make fonts bigger for fullscreen usage (see below). The dropdown shows all installed skins and is useful to easily switch between them.
  
• The "M2 status" is invisible when a web page is focused. If a mail view is open it shows the mail count. If a chat room is focused it shows the chat topic (note: a long chat topic breaks the status bar and makes the buttons to the right disappear until another tab is focused).
  
• The custom Adblock button toggles the Content block mode and makes this excellent feature more visible (similar to the Adblock extension in Firefox).
  
• The Fullscreen button switches to a custom fullscreen mode with Main Bar, Tab Bar and Status Bar. This makes fullscreen surfing even more comfortable. Together with the usage of the Apple Remote which Opera supports in Fullscreen mode I use this alot for hands-free surfing. Try it, it's great. You can even customize the fullscreen shortcuts inside Opera. My custom keyboard setup makes use of spatial navigation.
  

It took a long time and some severe customization work but currently I'm really happy with the new setup and especially with Khadgars great icon set. If you want to try my other set-up with Page Bar on top and address bar below then you can use the following links. The toolbar set-up has all of the buttons I described here, too. This includes some that I didn't even describe yet like the "Remove all finished" in the Transfer toolbar.

• Skin: http://demuths.macbay.de/iopera/files/skins/test/entr'adcte2.zip
  
• Toolbar setup: http://demuths.macbay.de/iopera/files/toolbars/iOperad.ini