My OperaSpeed dial tips
Thursday, March 1, 2007 5:41:30 PM
Article updated for 9.2 release
In the weekly we released on feb 28th, we introduced a feature called "Speed dial".
What is it?
It is a simple grid of thumbnails, a visual kind of top 9 bookmarks, that take the place of the mostly useless blank page.
Using sped dial
To add your favourite page as a speed dial entry, you can:
There are four ways to access your speeddial entries.
As you can see we have paid close attention to accessibility, so that both keyboard and mouse users can use it with ease. For the visually impaired, the fonts in speeddial follows the settings for dialogs and use decent contrast.
Speed dial is optimized for 1280 x 1024 resolution, but it scales well below that, with a lower limit of about 400 X 450 for the opera window itself. Zooming is currently not possible.
Tips
Some people just want a blank page instead of speeddial. One obvious way to achieve this is to use the "Hide Speed dial" button in the lower right corner of speeddial. This button sets a permanent setting stored in the file opera6.ini in your opera user folder. To use even more settings, go to opera:configs speed dial state. Options are
Another way is to use a button that opens the "opera:blank" instead, this one: New page (Click it if you use Opera, and you get a custom button installed)
Other times, you don't want to open a new page at all, you just want a button that toggles speed dial on and off in the current tab, and this one will do that for you: Speed Dial.
All speed dial entries are reloaded when you click the reload button in the address bar. Each speed dial entry can be reloaded separately by right clicking it and choosing Reload. Each entry can also be set to reload every so often (from the same menu), this is quite handy. You may want to do this if you rely on the speed dial to determine if the page is updated, since reloading it is the only way to update it. We will try to improve this later, like for example updating it when you visit a page in speed dial.
In Kiosk mode, speed dial is disabled. To enable a special, uneditable version of speed dial for kiosk mode, append -kioskspeeddial to the command line (opera -kioskmode -kioskspeeddial). This is great for schools, libraries, hotels and other public institutions that need a simple and safe way to give information to their users.
In the weekly we released on feb 28th, we introduced a feature called "Speed dial".
What is it?
It is a simple grid of thumbnails, a visual kind of top 9 bookmarks, that take the place of the mostly useless blank page.
Using sped dial
To add your favourite page as a speed dial entry, you can:
- Drag a tab to a thumbnail
- Drag a bookmark to a thumbnail
- Click an empty thumbnail
- Use the tab key to navigate to an empty thumbnail and press enter.
- To replace a thumbnail, right click it and press Edit. The keyboard way is to press the menu key (the strange key next to the windows logo key) or alt+Enter, this will bring up the config dialog again.
There are four ways to access your speeddial entries.
- Click the thumbnail
- Press Ctrl+1 to 9 on you keyboard (Cmd+1 to 9 on the Mac)
- Enter 1 to 9 in the address bar and press enter
- Use the tab key to navigate through the speed dial entries and press enter when you reach the one you want
As you can see we have paid close attention to accessibility, so that both keyboard and mouse users can use it with ease. For the visually impaired, the fonts in speeddial follows the settings for dialogs and use decent contrast.
Speed dial is optimized for 1280 x 1024 resolution, but it scales well below that, with a lower limit of about 400 X 450 for the opera window itself. Zooming is currently not possible.
Tips
Some people just want a blank page instead of speeddial. One obvious way to achieve this is to use the "Hide Speed dial" button in the lower right corner of speeddial. This button sets a permanent setting stored in the file opera6.ini in your opera user folder. To use even more settings, go to opera:configs speed dial state. Options are
- 0 for folded (like when pressing the button)
- 1 for normal
- 2 to disable modification and
- 3 to disable it completely
Another way is to use a button that opens the "opera:blank" instead, this one: New page (Click it if you use Opera, and you get a custom button installed)
Other times, you don't want to open a new page at all, you just want a button that toggles speed dial on and off in the current tab, and this one will do that for you: Speed Dial.
All speed dial entries are reloaded when you click the reload button in the address bar. Each speed dial entry can be reloaded separately by right clicking it and choosing Reload. Each entry can also be set to reload every so often (from the same menu), this is quite handy. You may want to do this if you rely on the speed dial to determine if the page is updated, since reloading it is the only way to update it. We will try to improve this later, like for example updating it when you visit a page in speed dial.
In Kiosk mode, speed dial is disabled. To enable a special, uneditable version of speed dial for kiosk mode, append -kioskspeeddial to the command line (opera -kioskmode -kioskspeeddial). This is great for schools, libraries, hotels and other public institutions that need a simple and safe way to give information to their users.
