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I didn’t start work on the Opera 10 redesign until April this year, so what was doing between November (when I started) and then?

Opera Mini 5!

My first day at Opera, was visiting the team out in Linköping, Sweden, where they showed me the work they had been doing. Up until now, Opera Mini has always been a text-based interface out of necessity. There was limit to the size the download could be (which I think was around 100k). Overstep that and some devices just fall over, but it was worth optimising in order to accommodate as many handsets as possible. Now the allowance is bigger, but not substantially, and it’s incredible how much fits into the Opera Mini download. They showed me an interface that not only used animations and visual speedial, but was touch screen compatible. A lot of the work had already been done, but I had a great time working on the interface.

I can’t take all the credit for the interface design though. Apart from the work that had already been done, my time on Opera 10 meant that the Mini team had to continue without me to do the final polish, and a superb job they’ve done too.

I’m working on separate blog post, going into more detail about the design of Opera 10 and Mini 5, but for now, go and have a play with the Mini 5 beta.

Today, Opera launched it’s jewel in the Opera 10 crown: Unite. Around 3 years in the making, this service and it’s APIs allow you to easily share content from your computer to the world at large or just a select group of friends. It’s an ad-hoc personal webserver where you just choose a service (Photos, Media, Files. etc) and tell it where that content is – Unite does the rest. Lawrence Eng’s post on labs.opera.com does a great job of explaining Unite further.

I was a little nervous that the marketing talk (“Reinvent the web”, “servers belonging to strangers”) would distract from what is a great fun service and idea. Fears were unfounded though, as a majority of people have embraced Unite for what it is, and love it.

If you haven’t tried it yet, head over to the labs and remember: like any service with an API, the real excitement is in waiting to see what people do with it…

Since last weeks update, I’ve not only refined the Safari style buttons, but the iTunes style buttons too. These look miles better, so if you’re using the round buttons, please re-download and install.

This will be the last update to the Omniweb theme for a while, but I will be updating my Camino theme with these new icons soonish.

Download the Tiger theme for Omniweb 5.5 (888k)