Tag Archive for 'progress'

Opera 9.5 gets improvements after feedback

Published
by
kyleabaker
on June 6, 2008
in Applications, News, Opera, Uncategorized and Web Browsers
. 0 Comments

Today the Opera Desktop Team released improvements to the new skin which was released only yesterday! The improvements come from an amazing 300+ posts by users like you and me in just 24 hours. What makes that even more incredible is that this is a beta and snapshot blog, so it’s typically just a small group of people who participate…but not this time!

The new skin has brought the Desktop Team a great deal of attention! If you have a digg account then you should help digg this!
http://digg.com/software/Opera_s_new_modern_UI

The improvements to the skin are aimed at correcting issues that were reported by the majority of the visitors yesterday. More improvements will come shortly (maybe Monday!), but for now the changelog consists of the following:

  • Improved contrast between active and inactive tabs in the tab bar
  • Higher contrast for the text on inactive tabs to increase readability, especially on laptops
  • Brighter background in the panels
  • A tiny bit more color: We added the Home button as default by popular demand
  • We tuned the color intensity of the color themes (Tools: Appearance: Color scheme) to be more usable with both this and other skins. Try it out again!
  • Improved visibility of the scrollbars
  • Buttons no longer grow wider when you press them
  • Nicer background for security status on https pages

To use Opera with the new improvements and test them out, you can go to the latest post or you can use the links I’ve posted below for you:

If you find a bug or an improvement to the skin or this build then help us all out by posting it here:
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2008/06/06/turtle-wax

This post is an update to the initial Opera 9.5 skin improvements post from yesterday. To read more about this, you should read the post from yesterday.

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Opera 9.5 just got a face lift!

Published
by
kyleabaker
on June 5, 2008
in Applications, News, Opera, Picture, Uncategorized and Web Browsers
. 0 Comments

Good news today for Opera browser fans! The Browser received a much needed face lift today. The desktop team has (on a side project) put together a new skin for the browser to enhance it’s appearance, improve functionality and bridge the gap between a few more cross-browser usability issues.

The new skin is now installed by default in the latest Opera 9.5 snapshots from the Desktop Team’s blog. However, if you need some time to get used to the new skin, they have also packaged the previous skin in the installer as well and it is called the Opera Classic skin.

Well, what are you waiting for? Go download this bad boy as you continue reading the rest of this post! You can grab the download from the original post (which is here), or you can just use the links I’ve gathered below for you. ;)

Now that you’ve got the download process going on in the background, I’ll tell you a little bit about the changes that you may notice.

The new skin has replaced all of the old icons that you may be used to and with glossier and shinier new ones. The back, forward, refresh, stop, etc. buttons are all easily recognizable, but different.

It didn’t take me long at all to like the new skin! I actually liked it from the instant I restarted Opera!

One thing, however, that I used quiet often that has been changed is the panel toggle button that extended up the left-hand side of the window. You could click the talk and narrow button to show or hide the side panel and it’s windows.

A new button has been placed to the left of the tabs that does the exact same thing now. I’m still getting used to it, but I think it’s a good change..as many of you may not have known about the older button in the first place. :P

The New Tab button is now moved to the right side of the row of tabs. It moves as the tabs row grows and is designed..or placed there to be more conveniently placed. This change is also one of the areas that Opera is working to bridge the gap between usability in Internet Explorer 7+ and Opera.

If you’ve used Internet Explorer 7 or 8 (beta) then you known that the new tab button is on the right side of the row of tabs and follows the tabs. Well, this is the same behavior as Opera now. :D

The panels icons are also new. Although they take a little more time to get used to than the navigational icons, they are still a much needed update!

One thing that I’m not in favor of is the background color of the windows in the panels tab. The windows are, in my opinion, too dark and slow for the eyes to glance through.

I’ve spoken with some of the developers and they have told me that the skin is by no means finished. They are taking feedback from everyone, tweaking the theme, releasing it and then taking feedback again.

If you have any suggestions or feedback at all for them then you should go post it in the blog so they hear your voice! You can make a difference in the development of Opera!
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2008/06/05/looking-sharp

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More progress on BimmerMania.com phpBB3 conversion!

Published
by
kyleabaker
on May 17, 2008
in News
. 0 Comments

While sitting on my butt at home (after another surgery) I’ve been converting my BimmerMania.com website from phpBB 2.0.23 to phpBB 3.x. The actual forum was fairly straight forward and simple to convert! That took about 15-20 minutes before that part was complete. That is counting the time that I wasted searching for guides, tips and tricks on the conversion so I wouldn’t piss off any members of the site by messing up anything. :D

Well, I made the new design live and the board is enabled! I’m still tweaking several pages, but I decided to make go a head and make it live simply because the boards are pretty active and I didn’t want to manually copy new posts from the old forum which was live (phpBB2) to the new one (phpBB3). That would have been too much work! Oh and copying over new members and matching their posts.

The conversion is simple, but it’s a one time deal, you can’t sync several times to update posts and members as far as I know. If I could have just synchronized all of the posts and members later then I would have completed the entire conversion behind the scenes and released it all at once. Oh well.

Anyhoo, the fun and long part of the conversion if two fold:

  1. Recreating all of the custom pages, such as the downloads section, takes some time to perfect. I have a good habit of trying to validate all of my pages (the entire site), so it takes a bit longer per page than just making the content show up. ;) (Btw: WordPress has a nasty habit of mixing lists and <p>’s like crazy. I’m still trying to work out some of those validation errors. :( Can’t blame anyone but myself..and the javascript back-end to the visual editor, lol.)
  2. Tweaking the theme to look awesome, clean, slick, relevant -> Zen. This is one of the most important aspects of web design in order to get a crowd to use the site. I mean, who wants to use a website that looks like it was designed back in the text only days of the world wide web? Even if it worked perfect and never made or caused any mistakes..the interface has to be appealing!

Well, I’m now about half way done recreating the downloads section of the site. The only remaining portions after this are the contact page (it’s there, but none functional at the moment) and a garage. There are apparently no garages made as of yet for phpBB 3.x, so it looks like I may need to port the car garage that I used in phpBB 2.x over. This could take some time. :(

Oh well, back to work!

UPDATE (2008-05-23):
Well, BimmerMania.com is pretty much completely converted to phpBB 3.0.1! I’ve held off on a couple of items in my to-do list until I have time to get around to them. They aren’t show-stoppers, so the site is fine without them (just two fairly small tweaks).

The phpBB Garage for phpBB 3.x is coming kind of slow. I’d prefer to use a Garage that’s already been developed, but hey..what are you gonna do when there’s nothing out there already!? If anyone comes across a garage mod then please let me know!

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What’s New..

Published
by
kyleabaker
on January 3, 2008
in MySQL, News, PHP and Web Design
. 0 Comments

Well, I think you’ll all find this useful at one point or another. I’ve implemented editing for user comments, finally. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and correcting some errors here and there, but now you can correct your own or add more to your comment. However, there are just a few things you will need to know:

  1. You will not have the option to edit your comment unless your ip address is the same one that was used when you posted the comment. It is best to edit the comment soon after originally posting it since ip addresses do change frequently for some.
  2. You cannot edit your comment after a specific time period from originally posting it. I will use a 48 hour interval to start out with. This interval may change, but I’ll keep you up to date.

Off to finish F.R.I.E.N.D.S. on TBS!

UPDATE:
Quoting is also an option now! Both of these features rely on javascript and will be improved greatly in the near future. They are just kind of 1.0 versions I guess, or maybe alpha. ;) Enjoy.

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