Into The Unknown

Mmm, reheated browser wars anyone? Opera released their latest Alpha build of Kestrel (aka Opera 9.5, Alpha 1) on the 4th of September. I, being slow and lazy (as per usual) held back on downloading it until earlier this week.

I've been playing about with it on both my XP laptop and 2000 desktop, and I've been MIGHTILY impressed. I use the big 3 (Firefox/Flock, IE and Opera) daily, in fact I have all three clients open right now! However, I find myself leaning towards Opera more and more. Firefox feels a little clunky and bloated to me, and even with addons like FasterFox and my own tweaks, it can drag its heels sometimes.

I'm not saying that Opera 9 is without sin... Like any browser, it has its odd flaw (for example, if I'm a little too hasty (re)loading a webpage Opera can sometimes get stuck mid-pageload, resulting in me having to close the tab, presumably killing the loop the browser's stuck in, and then reopening a tab with the same URL, which makes it work first time). That's about the only *real* flaw I can find with Opera, though I don't use their integrated mail client, so I wouldn't feel comfortable to comment in a qualified manner about that aspect of the software. Outlook's hardly the perfect mail client though, and I only use it because of its great ActiveSync features (yep, I'm a WinMo PPC phone user, my MDA Vario 2 never leaves my sight these days!) What's just as exciting is that when Opera 9.5 makes it to retail status, it's going to get a simultaneous release for both cross-OS desktop and MOBILE USERS! That's going straight onto my phone as soon as it comes out, I already use Opera Mobile on my device but I can't wait for the next version.

Thinking about it, I should really give Opera Mail a try, I have plenty of email accounts knocking about. Anyway, on to the good stuff...


Opera 9.5 has either improved on or brought many wonderfully-useful features to the end user in their latest browser build, the most notable for me being Full History Search, right from the URL bar (this is incredible, and I'll elaborate further below) and the ability to reopen both closed tabs and, now, closed windows, from the Trash Can feature. Speed Dial also has an undo feature, and Opera Mail has IMAP (ooo!) support, plus general speed increases.



Full History Search is possibly one of the best innovations I've come across in the current crop of browsers. There've been times when I've sat in front of my computer, struggling to get my brain into gear to remember the URL (or some keywords) for a site I was on last week but closed, then forgot the URL of. Full History Search gets around this problem by letting you just type in words found on the webpage, so if you were on this web site, for example, all you'd have to do is type "beta test blog" and the entry would appear in the FHS bar with some relevant information - and you'd just select it / click it to load it back up. What makes this even easier to use is the fact that the browser lets you do this from the URL bar, so you just hit Ctrl+D (or Ctrl+L for the old-skool Opera users! though I prefer Ctrl+D) and type what you can remember from the text on the webpage... And blam, quick as a flash, there's your webpage.

HOW USEFUL IS THIS!

I've been so impressed with the upgrades and improvements in Opera 9.5a1, it's actually become my preferred browser of choice. The only downside is that there appears to be no way to disable Opera's inbuilt BitTorrent client, so if you click on a .torrent link it'll try and fire up its own BT client every time, meaning you have to crack open Firefox or IE to load the link up (if you don't just open links directly in your Torrent client's Open File dialog, that is). A minor pain, and I'm sure the ability to disable Opera's BT client will be added in a future alpha or beta build.


As Opera said on their own Kestrel release announcement page,

All that, and this is just the alpha. Even more amazing stuff will arrive shortly. Thanks for taking the time to evaluate.

Other people have also been alpha testing Kestrel, and have written their own comments and reviews - including Peter Gasston, iVirtua Community and a nice-sounding chap called David Woods, on their respective blogs (Mr. Woods sounds like a talented, witty and intelligent person - we share a surname, so if I'm anything to go by...) </sarcasm>

I know that some people prefer Firefox due to Opera's Widgets not being quite as intensively-developed as Firefox's extensions, but personally I don't use widgets or extensions that much - I certainly don't have extensions continually RSS feedscraping or anything operating remotely in realtime, unless it's for design purposes (like DOM inspectors). What I'm after is a clean, well-written browser which can handle being stressed with loads of tabs and multimedia content, multiple Flash instances, video player instances, and sites with lots of content, right down to huge several-hundred-kilobyte chunks of poorly-written HTML. My average load on a browser during a session is 30 to 40 tabs in one go, and that's when Firefox really starts to chug, even with 2 gig of RAM installed. Opera just seems to handle having loads of tabs open much better, possibly due to its (arguably) leaner rendering engine. It certainly feels faster, and the latest Alpha feels almost like a beta, there's no noticeable speed drop for me, and just about all of the functionality from 9.2 is there in 9.5a1 without big gaps in the UI showing placeholder text. The subtle UI effects, present in Opera since a few versions ago now, don't go unnoticed either - and I love the additive-style lighting effects when you mouseover menu items and tabs. All these small touches really add value to the user experience, and it's the only browser where I feel quite happy about leaving it in its unskinned state because it's more than pretty enough!


Kestrel installs right alongside any existing Opera installation you might have, another geek-friendly consideration from the Opera team, so you can have 9.2 and 9.5 running simultaneously. I am doing exactly that right now, and neither browser is balking at the other running at all - [borat]great success![/borat] So go grab your copy of Kestrel and install it now, you have nothing much to lose aside from a few seconds of your time, and a very pretty, efficient and feature-packed (standards compliant!) browser to gain as a result.

Blogged with Flock

Here's a handy little search engine I stumbled across the other day - BYWav.com, a bilingual English/Mongolian search engine, currently in beta. Created by the designer of niqi.net, a categorised worldwide news aggregator web site (in English), BYWav's main aim is to provide search services by way of its Super Search, and - the most interesting feature - an English/Mongolian dictionary service, right from the search box. You search for a word, for example "name", and it produces a list of all the various Mongolian equivalents, along with their phonetic pronunciations. The dictionary isn't complete up to the point where it has context for each different interpretation, but for anybody either learning the language or looking for variations on a particular word, this site has to be really quite useful.

I know how to say 'feckless' in Mongolian now, so the day wasn't a total loss!

Check it out for yourself: BYWav.com.

Martin Belam has introduced a new UK news site aggregator to the masses, under the moniker of Chipwrapper. It sources fresh articles from all the major broadsheet and tabloid newspapers, plus a smattering of ITN, BBC and Sky articles (because he thought it would be "weird" to not see these contributors in his aggregated content) but there's no content featured external to British publications.

If you've never been to a British fish 'n chip shop, here's a brief introduction to the historical significance of the name "Chipwrapper": takeaway fish 'n chips have traditionally been wrapped in newspaper (it tends to be a good insulator and it's cheap, and it's one of those comforting familiarities) - a chip shop which doesn't wrap your stuff in yesterday's newspaper is either snobbishly upmarket or very popular because they've run out of sheets! I think it's quite an apt name.

Anyway, here's Martin introduced his project to the Backstage mailing list:

Hi all, I wanted to introduce... a site I've been working on, and invite you to have a play with the feeds being produced, and maybe help make some new tools for it.

Called Chipwrapper, it is intended to be a hub for searching purely UK newspapers and UK news sources.

OK, I know, I know, the Chipwrapper metaphor doesn't work once you add TV news. Originally it was strictly newspapers only, but it just seemed weird to be searching UK news and not see links from the BBC, ITN and Sky.

The homepage is a headline aggregator and a Google Custom Search Engine which only brings back results from the major UK newspapers, plus the TV news giants.

I plan to add regional and local newspapers to the results later in the year.


There are Opensearch plugins and a custom Google Toolbar button for the service.

http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/browser_search_plugins.shtml
http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/google_toolbar_buttons.shtml


There are also some RSS feeds for news headlines, sport headlines and football headlines - with some rugby-flavoured stuff to come to tie-in with the upcoming world cup.

http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/rss_feeds.shtml

There's also a Headline Buzz feature. It uses a longer Yahoo! Pipe which takes ten headlines for each source - http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=QKDz_ihT3BGSheQho_NLYQ&_render=rss
- and then analyses the most popular words.


The top 7 words (at the moment) appear on the Chipwrapper homepage as the Headline Buzz links, but there is also a headline buzz RSS feed.
This has all of the words (minus "stop" words like 'the', 'of' etc) that appear more than 3 times in the set of headlines in popularity order. It refreshes every hour.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/chipwrapper-buzz


There's a page on the site about making DIY stuff, with links to all the feeds and the original Yahoo! Pipes I've used to mash-up the newspaper content in one place.

http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/tools/make_stuff.shtml

Personally, I think this is great for those of us who enjoy reading around but don't like relying solely on Google News (or trusting it, for that matter) to deliver an impartial spread of national and international news. Really, all that's missing is a 'myChipwrapper' feature where you can choose your own pick of the newspapers for display - then I could eliminate all those awful tabloid newspaper articles and just have articles from the quality broadsheets. Nevertheless, it's a very useful little thing to have on your bookmarks, and I'll certainly use it again... Chipwrapper might just grow on me.

'Michael Arrington' has moved into the world ofNew Media Foodstuffs with the launch of CrunchFood:

CrunchFood is the newest addition to the “Crunch” family founded by Michael Arrington, which includes TechCrunch, CrunchNotes, CrunchGear, TalkCrunch and MobileCrunch. A departure from our Web 2.0 themes, but a subject still near and dear to the hearts of geeks — food.

For those of you who haven't quite caught on yet, this is a clever fake - but if you're familiar with his writing style then you'll appreciate the nerdy humour. Some of the comments are absolute class, too.

Ok, so I've been both using and following the iPlayer for a while, and now I thought I'd voice my opinions about it for the 'benefit' of those who might have some misconceptions or negative opinions about it.

You can either stream or download the MP3 from its respective Odeo page, enjoy.


powered by ODEO


I've also got some lovely little reviews of a couple of very nice sites coming soon, too, stay tuned for those. :)

... I can't wait to give it a spin and see how it compares! Update (29/08/2007): I've had my Fontenna for about a fortnight and I've put it through its paces, doing a writeup at the moment. :) I guess there's advantages to being a Fonero and a long-time Fon user; I got my La Fonera for gratis (I managed to invite myself and get a free unit! so it wasn't quite one of those 'press review units', haha) but the promo code arriving in my inbox to get a Fontenna for just €2 (plus delivery) was definitely something I couldn't ignore!

If you're a keen geek, you'll most likely have already read the (badly) translated Engadget China review of their own Fontenna, but, you know, it's always nicer to have a natively-written English version. Other excuses for doing my own review? Manufacturing tolerances, different signal transmission capabilities of EU-licensed kit versus Chinese kit (which is probably only FCC-approved instead of both FCC- and CE-approved, if there's different models) plus subtle design differences... The wall wart has different pins on it...


Mine'll have nicer pictures.

Ok, off to bed for me - working nightshifts at the moment, 10pm-7am weeknights. They're horrible things - but oh well, needs must! I'm a student therefore my bank balance is in constant need of replenishment, and we students'll do almost anything for a bit of cash!