DataWind and the PocketSurfer 2

Some quotes:

the first of its kind to actually deliver the full power and original graphic intensity of the desktop web, rapidly and wirelessly - to the palm of your hand.

made possible by DataWind’s high-speed delivery platform that can reduce pages up to 1/30th of their original size, reducing network load and therefore costs.

....I wonder how these claims compare to Opera Mini?

Here's a rewrite of my post from the Opera Mini blog...

When it comes to the Opera Mini browser, it's very important to be able to have a profile (user settings, bookmarks, feeds, etc) that is independent of Mini.

Several reasons why:

• If we could save and edit bookmarks on our desktop *in addition to* our phone, it would create a seemless experience. Our bookmarks are the same if we save them on our phone or our desktop, or through a web app.
  
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• When updating Mini, you lose it all. You can't back up your bookmarks and "remember me" information. You start over at every upgrade.
  
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• Opera CTO and CEO have hinted at this, most recently in this Capitol Markets Day presentation
  
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• There's millions (ten!) of Mini users that could potentially be getting involved in the community. If they have an "easy in" and a reason to create a profile, it should be easier to get more community involvment.
  
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Use the Community! Since the compressed page is coming from Opera anyway...*AND* you have such a great community, you could have the users:

1) Download mini

2) on the page with the EULA include some text asking: "if you'd like to backup/sync your mini data..." along with the standard "login/create account" prompt that would allow the user to create a my.opera.com/ profile (or login for all of us that have one already)

3) That will establish a link up so that any bookmarks created on the handset will also be copied to the users profile.

4) The user can manage the bookmarks (at least), and some mini settings (like: **-fullscreen on startup!) from this page. It's defaulted to private viewing, but able to be viewed public. So Opera profiles created via Mini would have an "About" page and a hidden "Mini" page that could be made viewable.

...Opera gets community members, users get to keep data that gets lost everytime we update Mini, we get an easier UI to manage, we can share our mobile bookmarks with the community... sounds cool to me! Give the millions of Mini users more than just that "my Opera" bookmark that many of them probably wouldn't know what to do with- but now they have an account and can easily get right to community involvement.

It's only natural to then extend this capability to the desktop as well. I picture a "local" and an "online" bookmark setting. The online could be flagged as public or private as noted in the Mini example, but will always be available to the user.

Then any desktop upgrades, beta testing multiple computers will all be synced together, including Mini.

I bookmark slashdot.org one time and it's available on any version of Opera I install via my Opera Community Profile (which I may choose to share with the rest of the community).

Specifically and personally, I think that Opera is a great tool for fans of those really big swiss-army knives. It's an everything-in-one approach, much like the original Mozilla Suite and Seamonkey, and that totally works for some people. However, the experience can be quite overwhelming for the average Web user. Chris Beard, Slashdot interview

I've never understood this... especially now that Firefox isn't generally thought of as the "bare bones" browser anymore. They are getting more and more feature rich with every release. Further, Opera's features *NEVER* get in the way. With the Swiss Army Knife, you can't get your fingers in there to get at the knife blade because it's wedged between the spoon, saw and screwdrivers. In Opera, that's just not the case at all. I'd at least understand the point if it was being made about a preference dialog or something, but to blanket statement like that (especially when Firefox is heading its way towards "feature rich") is rather odd.


When describing Firefox features, he goes on to say:

For those who don't need it, it's mostly out of the way and costs them nothing in terms of usability. But when you do need it, it's there, and it helps.

...which is exactly how I think of M2 (mail), IRC, Bittorrent,.... in Opera.

The idea of user constructed browsing has been around as long as browsers, but I first saw it defined by Jakob Nielson in his Jan 2005 "AlertBox" article on Reviving HyperText as:

"..any structure that's built by the user and added on top of existing hypertext."

Quite simply, allowing the user the power to create their own information to give context and meaning to the authors webpage. For example- you're searching Craigslist for a sofa, each page you visit, you can jot a note down that you only see next time you come back to that couch: "Called this guy on Monday, willing to help me move it" or "Played phone tag with this guy, sounds like a jerk." You have your own research and data mixed in with whatever is showing up there on Craigslist. Where I would *love* to use something like this is on every single login page I've ever seen. You could use it as your own "password reminder" and jot a note down like "Password: My first dog's name with my son's b-day" or something like that that. Mixing the web page data with your own.

Opera, of course, already has a gambit of features that fall into this category. We'll touch a few briefly to give you an idea of what I'm talking about...

• Notes- It's been around a long time, and the user community has tried to extend this idea. It's the first thing that comes to mind when you read Nielson's and Scott Berkun's article on doing research and annotating web pages. I use the Notes for researching, but the biggest draw it has for me is the "password reminder" thing I mentioned above.
  
  
• UserJS- Ad Blocking et. all- Modify the actual content on the webpage. Don't like how google image search lays out the webpage? Change it with a userjs file to match the way you think.
  
  
• Bookmarks- Extends beyond the normal implementation by allowing us to create "nicknames" which we can use to match the bookmark up with our way of thinking. So I can just type "bank" in my address bar and get *my* bank, regardless of where it happens to be.
  
  
• User Defined Style Sheets- Allows users to take the existing page, and use their own stylesheets to make
  
  
• Site Preferences- Block popups, identify as, etc. all let you tailor your experience to the way you'd like it to be.
  
  

Where do we go from here?

Somewhere in the Opera 8.5-9.0 beta development, the Community was introduced to an interesting idea for bookmarks. In a nutshell, if the user had already bookmarked the site currently showing in the address bar, a star appeared in the same manner as the RSS/Feed icon currently does, ie, in the address bar. I recognized this as a small but important step in the direction of user constructed browsing, and was excited to see the feature since it addresses the "what do *I* want to know about this site?" question. I think it's useful information to know if I have bookmarked a site, and if I have, maybe I'd want to nickname it? Maybe create some metadata for the bookmark? Opera's real-time quickfind feature makes this task easy to do even without the address bar indicator, but it was nice to see at a glance.

Unfortunately, that feature is no longer with us. The overwhelming opinion from from the community was "don't tread on me..." or more specifically, my address bar. I fear the implementation may have hindered this user-constructed feature while it was still in its infancy. Because people didn't like an icon in the address bar (understandable), the feature itself has gone away. I'd love to see that feature come back... in fact, I'd like to see more of user-centered features, but with a different implementation. If we apply that defunct bookmark feature thinking to Notes, we'd have the ability to mark up pages on craigslist with our own data. Here comes the "Wish-List..."

I suggest that the following distinction be made- the address bar, and any icons included within, be from the site/author. We currently have the Widget and Feed icons there, and this makes sense as it's a feature the site/author has made available to the user. I propose we have another way to inform the user of their own "user constructed" content, which the orginal address bar star was. This new addition to the UI will be a way for the user to see all the things s/he has done to the page (the stuff the author has no control over).

My first thought is to use a panel. If you have this panel selected, as your browser changes URLs, it is updated to reflect user constructed data, in the same way the links panel or the history panel work. They dynamically change/update as you browse.

The two pieces of data I have in mind:

1. If you've bookmarked this page, you can get access to it quickly
   
2. If you've made a note from this page, you'll see it.
   

The second one is really what I'm after though- Notes. This is the much requested "sticky-notes" feature which would represent a major leap forward in user constructed browsing. Just look at ROBO/sticky-notes, Sticky Notes widgets, Firefox extensions, desktop sticky applications etc. to see that I'm not the only person wanting this kind of feature, but the implementations just are not quite there yet.

I'm not suggesting this is the best way (a panel), just the first place I thought of where this information would fit, so here's a crappy mockup:


...of course, this idea could be expanded upon to include other information beyond notes and bookmark metadata.


Where can we go from there?

I'm not sure where we go, but it wouldn't take a great technical leap to extend this idea out to a "social network" to have a "stumble-upon" type environment. Someone can host user constructed data about bookmarks and notes so that as *you* browse this page right now, you could see the notes that *I* have taken on it…but, like Josh Porter says, "personal value precedes network value" and the user constructed features should be first and foremost, for the individual.

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Related reading...

Scott Berkun on browsers (December 2004 -but still has some good points!)
http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay37.htm

...because we're most critical of those we love

This is a series of small, seemingly innocuous changes that could be made to the Opera user interface that would really improve the user experience.

First off- don't get overly defensive, I'll say up front, that I love Opera for many reasons, most notably is the ability to customize the holy heck out of it. My menus, toolbars, searches and especially mouse/keyboard shortcuts are all tailored to how I approach "browsing." In other words, I'm not unhappy with Opera in any way.

Some things to note:

1) You might think I'm making too big of a deal about minor things, like for example when you read the "Clearing the quick find" part. Yeah, that's true, I'm a glutton for details when it comes to user experience. I've collected a series of quotes that might help to illustrate where I'm coming from.

2) I also realize that all of these have probably been requested or noted in the Opera forums and are nothing new. But a short walk through the wish-list, and you'll find a vast array of requests. These ten items are all centered around the existing dialogs (or bugs?) and don't stray too far from what we're using today.

3) Of course, not being an Opera developer, I have no idea if these are feasible at all, and that's fine. For all I know, they may in fact require a rewrite of some major backend code and are cast off by those familiar with the inner workings just as quickly as they are read. This is just a handful of things I think could fit in with the existing user interface fairly well while polishing off the user experience. In other words, I don't think I'm suggesting major UI overhauls... just proposing little details.

So.. now with all those caveats out of the way... click on to read:


Read: 10 Small Improvements for the Opera UI