Usability Forum

Opera Unite is how I envision the web. <--period

By Eddie Lopez. Tuesday, 16. June 2009, 12:21:36

Opera Unite is exactly how I envision my web experience working. Currently, I have a complicated web hosting/FTP setup that is cumbersome and time consuming. With Opera Unite, it's drop dead simple to share photos with my family. I envision a a situation where I just turn on my digital camera, an "eye-fi" like wireless memory card + service downloads my pictures to a folder on my computer, and Opera Unite makes it available to all! User Centered, super simple...all I had to do was push a button on my camera. My only beef would be that it's too simple- I'd like some time to evaluate and remove pictures I don't want published.

I do kinda like the aspect of having all that stuff "backed up" on a server, off site, but I suppose I could still manage to do that. I'll have to be placated security wise as well, but 8 years of (my) continued use gives Opera the benefit of the doubt on this front (for now).

I'm off to set up my services and kick the tires- I'll be back with more later!

note to self: I suppose I could redirect my URLs to my new Opera Unite URLs for all photo sharing, since that's essentially what I'm using my hosting for.

Physical gesture based dialingiPhone podcast UI is incrementing towards "good"

Comments

Hiroyuki # 16. June 2009, 20:15

I like the idea behind it, which to borrow the firefox slogan we might dub "Take Back The Web - Part II", allowing you to host your own content without being subject to the whims of external sites, however it also has the potential to be immensely dangerous if applets end up sharing people's "My Documents" folder tree as blithely suggested in one of the dev.opera articles.

It's pretty vacuous for them to urge developers to "authenticate users", in reality the proposal is to make some or all of your hard disk part of the WWW namespace, so if Opera don't provide bombproof template code for developers and also carefully vet each service for security weaknesses (which is a specialist job beyond the skills of the average programmer), we could end up with the situation that has happened with firefox where some extensions being distributed are actually spyware that may hijack people's computers, or have flaws that allow them to be hacked to that effect. Opera Unite offers hackers the possibility of creating the ultimate file sharing zombie computer network, it mustn't be allowed to go that way!

Kenneth Maage # 17. June 2009, 08:25

Thanks Eddie! We tried really hard to make it "dead simple" to share, and I think we succeeded.

There were some difficult usability battles along the way, but we had good support from other departments and I think it turned out pretty well.

With the final fixing some of the issues that came up after release, I think we're in a good position.

Have fun getting United!

Kenneth Maage # 21. June 2009, 13:21

One of the main issues we're dealing with now are how to better communicate what address/link exactly to send to your friends, how do you know where to look for it, are there other easier ways to send the correct link.

It seems that a lot of times, people just instinctively go up to the address bar and copy that address. It's reasonable to assume, and how do we deal with the problems that can cause with the concept of you as the service owner have a different view of your own services than people visiting...

More work to do! But I'm glad we're getting real users' experiences and feedback.