an insiders view from the outside

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!

Another skin sucessfully update to Opera 9.50 (build 9542). Aside from adding the missing icons I also replaced all backgrounds and buttons with ones that scale better and changed the default icon size to 22px (from 16px).
Make sure to check out the included 32px icons as well, to do so enable "large images" in appearance-dialog.

I also decided to introduce version numbers to make following updates easier for you and me, this G.A.N.T version is 2.0.
Check my site or this blog to stay updated.

G.A.N.T
Download

G.A.N.T Native
Download



Qute receveid a small (silent) update as well, forgot 2 icons in the previous release. It's on version 1.31 now.