The Life of Me

Opera have released Opera 7.5 Preview 1, the most notable changes in my opinion are…

User interface redesign

This release includes a prototype design of Opera’s user interface, which has been revamped to make it cleaner and more intuitive. The ad banner has been reformatted into an ad bar at the top of the Opera window. The main menus have been restructured so they aren’t as cluttered. There’s a new “Tools” menu for items such as managing cookies, contacts, and Wand. All toolbar customizations are now done through the Customize toolbars dialog. The main and personal bars have been turned off and the most used web page buttons have been moved to the address bar. Any toolbar can be set to “Show only when needed” (most useful for the Navigation and Page bars).

RSS Newsfeeds

Opera now has experimental support for RSS Newsfeeds (RSS 0.9x, 1.0, and 2.0)–a syndication format often used on weblogs and news services–as part of Opera Mail. You can choose from a selection of pre-installed feeds by choosing “Newsfeeds” from the Mail menu. Newsfeeds are shown in the Mail panel under the Newfeeds access point. Please have a look at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss/ for more information about RSS.

Panels improved

As part of the user interface improvements, Opera’s panels are now more functional. The Hotlist has been renamed to Panels. The panel selector now defaults to the left and is always visible. Clicking panel names or pressing F4 toggles the display of Panels (ESC closes Panels). Panels can be maximized using Shift+F4, by clicking the maximize icon, or by double clicking on the panel selector. Maximized panels act as replacements for management dialogs used for things like contacts and bookmarks. All panels have toolbars and a panel selecting button at the top. Custom panels have toolbars to allow Reload (F5), zooming, and SSR display of panels. Also, the “X” to close Panels is back.

You can find more in depth information here and in this thread on the “My Opera Forums”

I’ll probably install this tomorrow and take a look at the improvements when I get a spare few minutes.

Posted on December 20th, 2003 at 2:48 am and filed under Software.

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