pretty much abandoned

[If you don't want to read the whole boring story jump right to the part where it's getting interesting: Adopt a skin]

As you might know I'm the author of several skins for Opera. To be exact, that's a full 34 skins I created. Most of these skins were created in the days of Opera 7 when I was still going to school, having lots of time available.

I started creating skins shortly before Opera 7 was released. Back then I tried to convince my parents to use Opera 6 but they didn't like it because they'd have to get used to a new UI. So I just copied icons from IE6 and XP and made them into an Opera skin (well, it wasn't really a skin but a buttonset, you could only change a small number of icons back then).

When Opera 7 was released shortly after it featured a completely rewritten UI (called "quick") and old skins wouldn't work anymore. The default skin wasn't that nice so I just started doing my own. I'm not sure which skin was my first, but I think it was Cocoa. I used that skin for several weeks and then, even though it was quite nice, got bored with it, and created a new one. By Opera 7.5 I had already published 30 skins, though it was really only like 15 as I always published native and non-native versions. Most of those were created because I was looking for a nice new skin for myself to use, others were requested by community members (Lightning, Minimalist).

And then there were two very special ones: DOS which I created for Eira who asked me for a skin like this and the never published Netscape 8 I created as proof of what's possible with Operas skin engine.

But for me personally the most special skin has long been Phoenity. As I mentioned before I very early published native and non-native versions of each skin, but Phoenity was the first skin to feature large (24*24px) and small (16*16px) versions of each icon and UI element. This enabled users to customize their Opera even more than before. I then tried to copy that approach to other skins, but as I now had to create two times as many icons it meant even more work.

As time was going other stuff became more important and I couldn't keep up with updating most of my skins. Several huge UI changes in Opera didn't really help making maintaining these skins an easy task either. This leads to the situation where we are today: Most of my skins haven't been updated for several versions, even the ones I tried to keep up-to-date weren't updated after 9.5.

As Phoenity was my main skin for several years (actually it was my default skin from 7.2 till 10.5 when I switched to the standard skin) that one often was the only one always up-to-date. Nowadays I just don't have the time to maintain any of my skins anymore (which is the main reason for switching to standard skin), I've made a decision:

I'll put up all my skins for adoption!

What I wish for my skins is that someone will take over as their maintainer and offer a version updated for the latest version of Opera to the community. An "ideal" maintainer will offer them with icons in two sizes (like Phoenity) and also maintain both native and non-native versions.
I'll provide the new maintainer with all graphics I have.
As I invested a lot of time into these skins (I'd estimate there's about 500-600 hours of work in Phoenity) I'd very contented if someone would continue maintaining these skins in my spirit.

If you're interested in adopting any of my skins just send me a message.

Skins up for adoption (listing only the "main" version, not the native one)

• Phoenity
• Qute
• Cocoa
• G.A.N.T.
• BeOS
• DOS
• Netscape Modern
• Opera IBIS
• iMacOS Lars
• Lightning
• Mac IE 5
• Opera 6
• Opera 6 classic

Adopted skins:

• IE6XP -> likeIE

<sentimental blah>Putting up all these skins for adoption wasn't an easy decision as a lot of memories are connected to some of them and especially Phoenity has been my "baby" for years with endless hours of fine-tuning going into it. But now I hope for them to find new parents and live long and prosper.</sentimental blah>

Two months ago I wrote a short tutorial, Getting started with Opera skinning, that introduced users into Operas skin engine. It's aimed at the normal user who just wants to makes a small change on his skin, like adding a new icon for a custom button.

Today my next article on Operas skin engine was published on dev.opera.com, Opera Skinning.
This is a full-featured, five page tutorial aimed at those who want to create their own skin. It starts by describing the structures of skins and how to edit them, then explains all the options you can set in skin.ini followed by the elements used in skin.ini, some examples to illustrate what it explains and ends with a tips & tricks section.
If you plan on creating a new skin you should really have a look at this tutorial, so should you if you already created skins as it explains some stuff that was never officially documented before!

If you have any questions regarding those tutorials feel free to ask in the articles comments section and I'll try to answer your questions as time allows it.

I'd also like to thank everyone who provided me help to finally get an official documentation of Operas skin engine, especially Mitchman for fixing various bugs and implementing new features in Operas skin engine, Remco for various sessions of proof-reading, Tobias for his excellent documentation on operawiki.info and of course Chris for making all this possible!


EDIT: As several people asked about updates of my skins for 9.5: I currently don't really have the time to update all my skins. Phoenity will see an update soon (please don't ask me when soon is), about the other skins I have no idea yet. If you like one of those skins and feel like updating it contact me please.

EDIT 2: I'm this weeks Member of the week on MyOpera. Very nice way to promote the skinning article :-)

Remco discovered a nice hidden feature in Kestrel that many people have been waiting for since the introduction of speed dial about a year ago:
You can edit the number of items shown in speed dial!

To do that browse to your "profile" directory (see "Help > About Opera" for its location), open "speeddial.ini" in a text edit (e.g. Notepad) and append the following lines:

[Size]
Rows=4
Columns=5

Don't use too large numbers though or Opera will use all your CPU for quite some time.

Thanks Opera developers for implementing this very popular request and Remco for finding it!