...because we're most critical of those we love

This is a series of small, seemingly innocuous changes that could be made to the Opera user interface that would really improve the user experience.

First off- don't get overly defensive, I'll say up front, that I love Opera for many reasons, most notably is the ability to customize the holy heck out of it. My menus, toolbars, searches and especially mouse/keyboard shortcuts are all tailored to how I approach "browsing." In other words, I'm not unhappy with Opera in any way.

Some things to note:

1) You might think I'm making too big of a deal about minor things, like for example when you read the "Clearing the quick find" part. Yeah, that's true, I'm a glutton for details when it comes to user experience. I've collected a series of quotes that might help to illustrate where I'm coming from.

2) I also realize that all of these have probably been requested or noted in the Opera forums and are nothing new. But a short walk through the wish-list, and you'll find a vast array of requests. These ten items are all centered around the existing dialogs (or bugs?) and don't stray too far from what we're using today.

3) Of course, not being an Opera developer, I have no idea if these are feasible at all, and that's fine. For all I know, they may in fact require a rewrite of some major backend code and are cast off by those familiar with the inner workings just as quickly as they are read. This is just a handful of things I think could fit in with the existing user interface fairly well while polishing off the user experience. In other words, I don't think I'm suggesting major UI overhauls... just proposing little details.

So.. now with all those caveats out of the way... click on to read:


Read: 10 Small Improvements for the Opera UI

I have a couple things that I've had sitting around in draft form.

1) 10 Small Gripes with the Opera UI (that are seemingly easily changed).

2) Tutorial on advanced mouse gestures: going beyond the "application context" -and recreating a "poor man's expose" (...it's a working title)

If the MOUG has any interest in getting input on these, you can email me at moug at el73.net and we can hash out, edit, add, omit.

The target for number 1 is OperaWatch.com (and reposted here). The target for number 2 is this site.

...as a teaser, for the "10 Small Gripes.." article, the first one is:
1)Having to type the text (or string): "GestureRight" in the mouse gesture configuration UI. You don't *have* to copy Firefox (extension), but it's nice example of actually performing the move to capture it. Easier still (in the exisiting UI) would be just allowing us to abbreviate it with a key at the top of the UI. It's currently either a cut and paste pain, or confusion when you type "GestureRight,GesutreLeft,GestureRight" and can't figure out off hand why it's not working. Why not just type: "GR,GL,GR" instead? Much easier to proofread.

Anyway, if there's interest in contributing your thoughts, I thought we could peer review, help out with screen shots etc.

If anyone knows a good way to make a video for the mouse gestures tutorial, that would be nice too.

Comment or email me.