Simulation Sickness

Jup, you read that right. I, the great Opera fanboy (k, we all know there is no better browser around) am slowly getting annoyed of the way the development of opera goes. Here's a list:

1. Long-standing issues and simple improvements don't get implemented although they would really much contribute to a better overall usability (like [Ctrl]+[Tab] also when only 1 tab is left, Please restore the star in the address bar (hell, it was allready there), Opera and authenticating with a Chip-card, and so on)
   
2. Instead new features (widgets, unite) get implemented where a different solution - and a good solution that is - allready exists (like XAMPP, imo damn simple to use). Note that for these features also other long-standing wishes would be an improvement (like "closing opera to tray" and so on - see My 2 Cents on Opera's Widgets)
   
3. Skin issues: There is still no qt4 skin for linux x64 - or gtk would be even more appreciated. Oh, and guess who does not care about my font settings for the UI that are est in qtconfig?
   
4. Fx-Style shortcuts: damn, Ctrl+N for a new tab was great and I don't get it why this had to change. Also Ctrl-N means (in normal hotkey-terms) "new document" and not "new window". As I wrote in a comment on the 100-papercuts-series (great initiative imho) it should be sthg like:
   
5. Ctrl + N = new Document: look up user prefs if he/she wants to use tabs or not (which in apps that use tabs should default to "yes")
   
6. Ctrl + T = Allways open new tab (overriding user prefs)
   
7. Ctrl + Shift + N = Allways open new window (as shift points to the next-higher structure: document -> window)
   

K, I think I'm done with my friday-morning-rant (hey, I should make a series ). In short what I want is something like the 100-papercuts that ubuntu currently does for opera so all those small, long-standing bugs finally get some attention and (hopefully) get fixed). I am sure that such an initiative could also work with closed-source apps like opera, as there have been a number of community-driven stuff in the past (like "Ask John"). If this selection process gets merged with a tracker for these bugs (nothing big, just a table with bug description & status) we are golden.


Edit: Way, the desktop team just released their first qt4 build on x64. And I it.

So I just watched the 2005 movie War of the Worlds. I had that idea after getting myself a copy of the War of the Worlds play from Welles (yep, the one that caused a little hysteria), which I really liked. You can imagine how disappoinged I was by what filth Spielberg had produced.

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So, ph030 released his new version of opdf (0.3 and 0.3.1). This in turn made me fire up my ... gedit ... and do some more coding on my side (based on 0.3, but merged in 0.3.1 changes afterwards). the result is 0.3.2 with three major changes:

1) fixed some really sh**y js bug (let's just say that I didn't really get how onerror worked )
2) the first page now loads automatically when it's rendered - I'm thinking about changing this a little: keep the loading-indicator until every page is loaded and then replace it with the first one if no other page was currently called (maybe tomorrow)
3) re-merged the js-files and added a global variable for the layout mode (can be useful anyway)
4) used pdf2svg's internal loop instead of our external one again

I have a known issue though (but I don't know if it's my own stupidity or opera's): Sometimes the first page yields a parsing error as pdf2svg seems to not fully have written the file to hd. This can be worked around by simply pressing reload. This won't stop the parsing, so don't worry I haven't currently figured out why opera is too stubborn to call the onerror function but simply displays an error page (or why pdf2svg writes half-finished files for that matter) though ... well, maybe tomorrow when I'm a little more awake

cheers
Immanuel aka. Serious

opdf_032.tar.gz

As I allready mentioned this blog is not only about opera but also my studies. One course this year is called Multi-Agent-Simulation and deals with just that. Yesterday I had my end-of-term presentation and everything went well so now I will present my project to you, dear reader.

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