Petter Nilsen

Posts tagged with "beta"

Visual Tabs in Opera 10 beta 1

Wednesday, 3. June 2009, 07:10:00

Part of what I've been working on for Opera 10 is a new visual feature called Visual Tabs.

The new Visual Tabs goes hand in hand with the skin work we have been doing for Opera 10. Jon Hicks, now a Lead Designer with the Consumer division at here at Opera, has been the (evil?

) master mind behind this work and you can also see the initial progress of that work in this first beta.

What we have seen in the past is that the thumbnails that shows up when hovering tabs has been useful and popular among our users.
Taking the work that was introduced in Opera 9 a step further makes Visual Tabs the natural next step.
For this beta, they are not shown by default but can be enabled by dragging down the drag bar just beneath the tabs themselves. You can also double click the drag bar or middle click it show/hide the Visual Tabs completely.

Our goal has been to make something that is visually pleasing, yet remains useful for people that have a handful of tabs open and needs an easy and visual way to always know what site is on what tab.

What you see in this first beta is a first step, and there will most likely be tweaks and changes made to the current solution to address issues and feedback from our users.

If you absolutely do not want to see any sign of them, they can be disabled quickly and easily by right-clicking on the tab bar or an active tab, select Customize->Enable thumbnail previews.

We are open to suggestions on how to improve this feature.

25 comments

Speed Dial configuration in Opera 10 beta 1

Wednesday, 3. June 2009, 07:00:00

beta, speed dial, opera

Speed Dial has been an very popular feature after it was introduced in Opera 9.2, so popular in fact that pretty much every other browser out there has copied it in one way or another.
When a feature is so popular as it is, we have been cautious in doing anything that might disrupt how the feature works, how easy it is to use and the visual look of it.

However, 2 wishes has been frequent since Speed Dial was created. One is the ability to have more than 9 sites in the Speed Dial, the other is ways to improve the visual look of it using a user supplied background picture.

Your wishes have been heard, and I'm happy to present the new configuration dialog for Speed Dial, available from the bottom right corner of Speed Dial:

As you can see from the screen shot, you can now set a background image, set that it should be centered, stretched or tiled.

You can also see the layout of the Speed Dial from 4 ranging up to 25 sites visible in Speed Dial.

Hope you enjoy the new features in Opera 10 beta 1, and don't hesitate to offer constructive feedback or suggestions on how to improve this aspect of it!