One More Thing

Wednesday, 9. January 2008, 15:55:32

Looking for the perfect combination of a Browser and a Mailer on the Mac? Check out iLeopr'adcte!

Somehow Khadgars Entr'acte 2.0 Beta icon set (I'm loving it) inspired me (again) to try to mac-ify Opera on the Mac. I had two intentions: Unleashing the power of Opera by making more advanced functions available and giving it a more Leopard'ish user interface at the same time. In my personal version this means that Browser and Mail functions are available in the main bar making it unneccessary to open the panels at all for normal browsing/downloading/mailing tasks.

I used Khadgars skin as the basis to make sure everything I do not skin is as mac-like as possible (plus I could've never done such a unique and brilliant icon set myself). The button placement is based on Entr'adcte 2.0. This time I added grey backgrounds to the skin and a bunch of Leopard-style buttons for the Browser and the Mail part (you have to enable large images for a toolbar to see them). The Mail buttons are not that pretty but they should fit into the button style used elsewhere and I think they are quite self-explanatary aswell. This is how the mailer looks in my personal setup:

Here's a gallery with some more screenshots. If you want to give it a try here are some links and notes for you.

Skin
The skin is available in two flavors. One has the close button on the left of the tabs which is MacOpera default. Personally I don't like that placement, thus the other version has the close button on the right. Just click on one of the links to download and install the respective skin.

iLeopr'adcte Left (Close button placed left)
iLeopr'adcte Standard (Close button placed right)

Toolbar Setups
There are two toolbar setups aswell. The first one is based on Opera Standard with only some small modifications (Main Bar enabled, Address Bar disabled, Main Bar and Address Bar have the same elements, Content Block button in the Status Bar, custom Delete Mail button in the Mail toolbar). The second one is the setup that I have in use right now. It's heavily customized (quite similar to this setup) and has both Browser and Mailer buttons in the Main Bar plus several extra buttons in the other toolbars. Again just left-click to download and install the respective setup.

iLeopra'adcte Default (based on Opera Standard)
iLeopr'adcte (my personal version)

Notes
The skin currently only works in MacOpera since it relies on native MacOpera functions for Scrollbars, Push Buttons, Check Boxes etc. However it is almost a full flavoured skin and it should be pretty easy to add those elements from other mac'ish Opera skins and then make a non-native version that can be used on all Opera Desktop versions. I have added Leopard'ish buttons for as many functions as I thought neccessary. This includes the standard Address Bar/Main Bar elements and most Mailer buttons. Those are defined as "large images" which means you have to set a toolbar to show Large Images in order to see my buttons.

Not all large buttons are Leopard'ish, though. I can provide my empty master buttons if anybody wants to further skin buttons. If anybody plans to use this skin to do more work and publish it themselves please also ask Khadgar because 90 % of the skin are his work.

Happy New YearThere's something in the air

Comments

Nice Main Bar, hack boy

By minch, # 9. January 2008, 16:02:15

Looks really nice! This is another reason for me to start using 9.5 Beta at work too

By eiriks, # 10. January 2008, 07:55:15

Ooooh! Pretty! I'm going to be using this...

By AVL, # 10. January 2008, 19:23:05

Hi there, this actually looks really, really good.

One question: can you drag a tab to the area where you placed the mail-related icons? Somehow I can't place a bookmark there anymore (I don't know if this is skin-related or that's how Kestrel work. I'm using 9.23 at the moment, and used to place "extremely important" links there).

Thanks for the great work!

By kanketsu, # 29. January 2008, 02:28:33

Glad you like it. The change is not skin related, I think the underlying code was changed to make it harder for Opera newbies to clutter the UI with unwanted bookmark buttons. I think you're supposed to hold Shift or Command while you drag a link to place a bookmark on a toolbar.

By lachralle, # 29. January 2008, 07:01:28

The Command+Drag works. Thanks for the tip!

I've just noticed that bookmark placed on the toolbar no longer has its favicon. It only shows as a simple "Go" button.

Now I have a little problem.. this arrow-in-green-circle button is apparently larger then the rest of the group, and makes the toolbar appear much thicker (relatively).

The options seems to be between not putting any bookmark links at all, or switching off large icons and lose the well-crafted button set (noooooooo!!)...

What to do?

By kanketsu, # 30. January 2008, 02:21:47

I saw the same, it's due to the fact that I have to use large images in my toolbar set-up and do not (yet) provide a Leopard'ish large open bookmark button. However I noticed that the button is replaced by the favicon as soon as you click on it to open the bookmarked page -- at least that's what happened with a my.opera.com button.

By lachralle, # 30. January 2008, 07:01:54

Ah, yeah. After a recheck, it looks like the Go button will be used if the bookmark link doesn't have its own favicon. If it has one, it will be used. The favicons apparently are the same as your designed buttons, so they don't make the toolbar thicker.

However, it shows that few sites have high-quality favicons, and putting some of the lesser ones on the toolbar ... well, seems aesthetically incorrect.

But I think I found a solution to this: putting the links at the bottom, next to the adblock button. The mediocre favicons won't stick out like a sore thumb, and the Go button actually doesn't make the this bar thicker.

Speaking of Adblock, do you know how to make the text "Click element to block..." disappear after turning Adblock off? Or does it stay permanently in that tab, i.e you need to open a new tab to get a new one without the text?

BTW, just between you and me, I think your skin should be the default skin for MacOpera. Add graphite iTunes-like scroolbar, and it's a total win. But that's just me

One other thing, have you consider white fonts on the tabs? It might be easier to read since the background is already dark enough. I would like to check it myself, but unfortunately I don't know how to change that (Opera won't read my edited zip files - not sure why)

By kanketsu, # 31. January 2008, 01:10:44

It certainly is my default skin right now but I guess it would need some more polishing to become anyway near a Opera default skin -- to make sure everything works as ecpected under as many conditions as possible. I'm on the safe side since I use it with my own toolbar set-up so it's clear they work together.

I noticed the problem with the adblock status text, too. Not much I can do about that, sorry. It seems Opera used the same status field that's used for chat room topics for the Adblock toolbar, so once you enable adblock on a tab the status field is set but not reset when you return to the normal view. One could call that a bug but I guess they never thought anybody would place chat room topic status fields onto the status bar ...

If you want to see how tab texts look in white, click here.

By lachralle, # 1. February 2008, 10:40:36

Lachralle, as I predicted, the white tab texts are easier for me to read ... under certain viewing angle. If I sit straight up, black ones are better. If I recline/ slouch a bit, then the whites are better.

Bottomline, I'm keeping both. Besides, we can switch between them easily thanks to the bottom right button, right?

Don't worry too much over the polishing; it's already great. If you have some spare time, some additional buttons would be nice (I'd like to put AdBlock button at the main tolbar, but it doesn't go well with the looks of the rest of the gang). But I'm sure that once the 9.5 is out of beta, there will be many helps coming in that department - as well as those who'll create some variations (Shiira square jello butttons, anyone?)

PS
Do you know which setting affect the address field font size (the one where we type in URLs)? Seems like I can't find the respective option under Preference.

By kanketsu, # 4. February 2008, 02:21:59