Day: February 11, 2009

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It’s the Little Things (again)

The nice lil built-in touches I use day in and day out in Opera–easily-customized hot key combos, built-in mouse gestures, full-featured feed reader, online syncing* between different versions of Opera on different computers, etc., are among the reasons I keep coming back to it as my fav browser.

Once really nice–and often under-utilized–feature is Speed Dial. By default, Opera displays the Speed Dial page whenever one opens a new blank tab/browser window. The default Speed Dial page includes an example “tile” one can clik to go to an Opera intro page and eight more that are empty. All are editable to add/change to addresses one visits often. New Tab>Speed Dial>CLICK, you’re there. Nice. But nine “speed dials” weren’t enough for me, sooo…

Edit speeddial.ini while Opera’s not running to add

[Size]
Rows=4
Columns=6

…and,

speed-dial

I don’t have them all configured in this Win7 installation, yet, but 24 speed dials is better than 9, right?

🙂

More, but not Opera/browser related:

I miss the multiple virtual desktops Compiz afforded me in Ubuntu. I know of several commercial apps and some freebies in beta for Vista and XP, but why no virtual desktops in Win 7 “Ultimate” (albeit, beta)–built in? Or is the functionality available and I’ve just not found it? Irritating lapse. Multiple virtual desktops is something I’ve found in some form or another in all the Linux desktop Guis I’ve tried for several years, now–heck, even the tiny 95MB Puppy Linux distros have the functionality!

Puzzling. why isn’t it a part of the functionality? It’s a much, much more useful feature than some of the eye candy. heck, more useful than any of the eye candy.

Win7: Lose points for a missing feature.

*Yeh, yeh, I know: there are some add-ons for Internet Exploder, Safari, et al, that allow folks to do something similar, but note the “add-ons”.

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Windows Live? DOA @twc

Well, not quite dead on arrival, just not all that welcome, standing out in the cold and rain catching its death of a cold… *heh*

OK, OK, for purposes of testing ONLY I’ll install some of the “Windows Live” apps on this Win7 beta drive. Given ALL my past experiences with Microsoft’s treatment of email (well, not quite all; Outlook 98 wasn’t half bad), I wasn’t real eager to dump WL Mail onto this computer. I’m sure not using it for important email, though I’ll configure YPops to download mail from my “mostly junk” yahoo email account using WL Mail.

:: Check that/update ::

No, I rethought the “I’ll use Ypops/Yahoo account” thing. A Gmail account I don’t use much, instead. Only has about 4,000 messages to import, so should be an average test…

Back again. Took about a minute to import the nearly 4,000 messages. Easy-peasy setup of the email account, easier than Vista’s Windows Mail by a tad. Crappy default display of mail, have to fiddle with that. Not bad, but certainly not to my taste. I’ll see how it handles import/export of various contact files, mail, etc. and how easy (or not) filtering is. May be Good Enough for most folks, though.

:: Update/off ::

The other apps–Silverlight, Movie Maker beta, Photo Studio–all have perfectly good replacements from third parties, but I’ll try out the current iterations anyway, just to be fair.

If they install. That’s going to be the ticklish thing: will the WL apps that MS left out of Win7 install on the beta? We’ll see.