dW

My Designs Are Up!

Responses Closed

Edit: The designs have gone over really well. I’ve received a lot of PMs and have read a lot of messages here and on the My Opera front page thanking me for doing those designs. I really appreciate all the thanks, guys.

I’m really happy to see that two of my three designs are up. I finished them last week, and it was a several month collaboration between Fred and I. I still work for a living so I worked on these off and on for a couple of months.

I was contacted by Fred in March asking if I would be interested. Of course I was, so I sent a speedy, excitedly “yes” reply. About a month later I received an email from Fred with templates he was using for the new My Opera site along with what I was allowed to do and not to do. The rules I had to abide by amounted to this:

1. The structure has to remain the same as it is for the existing designs. This meant that my CSS had to be applied after Fred’s structure.css file.
2. Structure could be altered slightly to make images and design elements fit better.
3. I was able to change images and colors around however I liked.

That’s about it, really. I was essentially given free reign, some templates, and an okay to go nuts. What I did initially was create the designs in Photoshop, one by one. I would almost completely mock up the design in Photoshop for Fred to see. He’d approve the design, and I would move on to the next one. I didn’t have the templates where I could just jump in and do a design in my head without a full mockup, so it took some time to do all three designs in Photoshop, especially when it’s not very good at typography. It took about a month to do the three design mockups, and then about another month to code them. I’ll go through each design, one by one.

Early Bird

This one really started with my friend, Jeff, wanted a proper blog design for his My Opera blog. He prefers really simple layouts with focus mostly on the content rather than the layout itself. He’s not much for flashy graphics. He just wants his stuff read. Right about the time we were talking about one I got the email from Fred containing the templates and the go aheead to start on my designs. I just decided that the first design would be one that Jeff would enjoy.

The design does contain some images obviously, but nothing is in the design that takes the focus away from the content itself. There’s no special effects or anything like that. The photograph is a photograph I took myself (and I will soon put it in my photo library) of hummingbirds feeding from the feeder on my porch. The photograph supplied all of the colors for the entire design. Pretty much the entire focus of this one was to keep it simple. I think it does that. Fred named it, and I think it’s an excellent name for it.

Garden of Dreams

This one is the opposite of the previous one. When I got to this design initially I had no idea what I was going to do. One day I just sat around looking at other websites when I noticed there were some sites out there rewarding people with large displays where the bigger the screen you have the more you see of some picture or design in the background. I really liked that concept and I ran with it.

The design obviously involves flowers. I originally had an idea for a floral design to save for later (if I got to do more). I couldn’t think of anything else, so I merged two ideas I had into one. I don’t think it’s as nice or as elegant as the first one, but I think it works out fine. The photographs are taken by me of my mother’s flower garden. She has an excellent green thumb, and her flowers always make great pictures. I will be putting the set I took for this design up shortly, too.

In addition to the treat people with higher resolutions get on this design people with the typeface Zapfino will see it used in this design. If they’re using Opera they’ll get an even bigger treat and see Opera use ligatures and such with the typeface. No other browser does that but Opera. I was surprised to see Opera do that. Illustrator is the only program I’ve seen period on the Macintosh that can take advantage of the ligatures and alternate glyphs in the typeface; now I can add Opera to that list. Macintosh users will typically have this font already installed on their computers by default.

Oh and the title of this one was named by Jeff. It’s from Noriyuki Iwadare’s Grandia II Soundtrack. He was listening to that song as I asked his opinion on what it should be named. Odd how stuff like that happens.

As I mentioned there’s a third one. It ran into some problems with a copyright dispute. Fred and I didn’t know that there was a dispute. I’m just having to change some things up; after that the My Opera guys will make it available. In the middle of all this I am fixing my design. I don’t know when I’ll have it done as I’m doing it in my free time which is sort of limited these days. Anyway, I thought I’d let you guys know what went on with these designs.

Fuck Opera. Let’s Get Safari and Use Cool Hacks

five Responses (now closed)

This past Thursday I was welcomed with great news after a criticizing post I made on the Entr’Acte thread in the “Opera For Mac” forum on My Opera. I made a new friend out of the whole ordeal, and the news put me on Cloud 9. I fell from that cloud rather quickly, though.

As you can see the Mac users got some of the news about Kestrel a day before the rest of the community, having gotten more of the information from the Desktop Team’s update. The response initially was quite optimistic, but it suddenly turned quite sour. Why? My assumption would be ungratefulness. Like I said it started out quite jolly, but it turned suddenly to an attitude that no matter what Opera tries it won’t be good enough. After that it turned even more sour that fuels the title for my post, “Fuck Opera. Let’s Get Safari and Use Cool Hacks.”¹ Their tone wasn’t that affronted, but it could be read that way. Why do people think saying they’re going to use a competing program is going to get the developers they’re criticizing to do exactly what they want when they want? I’m sure if Opera could pull a perfect, spotless, and Mac-like UI out of their asses they’d do it.

Mac users typically expect more out of their developers than usual because they’ve been spoiled by seamless software and hardware integration along with applications that are quite unique and easy to use. Most Macintosh programs are simple programs geared towards doing a single task very well while looking good doing it, of course. To be quite frank Opera is about as ugly as a server monkey’s asshole on Mac OS X. The first time I used it I was appalled at how awful the interface looked. The sad thing is that it’s the same interface that I was used to on Windows, except with a dated half-assed Mac OS X look to it. That was in 2003. It’s over 4 years since Opera 7.0 Preview was released to the public, the first version released for Mac OS X. Opera’s looks haven’t changed any on Mac OS X. A few years back I started on my skin, Entr’Acte, in a attempt to make the program usable to me on Mac OS X. It doesn’t do that great of a job, but it does use the skinning system to the extent of its capabilities to do what it can do. Opera’s been good to me for creating the skin. I’ve received features I wanted so that the Macintosh users can use my skin with native UI elements. They’ve done what they could when they could to make it easier on us. Here comes Kestrel and an announcement stating a fresh looking UI for us Mac users; all that follows is bitching.

Criticism for the new build should come after, not before the build is released to the public. None of us except the developers have a clue what Kestrel will be like. I’m not expecting perfect. I never do, but hell at least give the developers a chance to prove themselves before throwing criticisms their way or threatening to use another program.

Personally if they want to use another program I think they should just go ahead and do it. They can go whine and bitch to those developers and leave Opera alone, especially when they’re trying their hardest to please a user base on a minority operating system that appears to be belligerent toward anything they’re attempting to do before they even see the fruits of the developers’ labor.

I’ve tried to look at myself for answers to this sort of behavior. I’m used to using Opera my way. That’s what Opera is about. You browse the way you want to browse. You make Opera out to be what you want it to be using everything Opera provides for you. I’m probably so fond of Opera bordering on fanaticism that I cannot see myself using another browser even when it doesn’t offer everything I want on my platform of choice at the present time. When Opera announces yet again something I’ve been asking for 4 years for and have waited patiently for I’m hurt when my colleagues can do nothing but whine and gripe about something they have no clue as to what it’s going to be like until the day it is released.

My thoughts are that they should be lucky that the program even exists on the Mac. Opera doesn’t have to do anything. It doesn’t even have to exist, but it does. Opera can be plenty successful even if it wasn’t developed for the Macintosh. I very much doubt Opera would stop developing for the Macintosh, but Mac Opera users should start being thankful that it does exist, develop some patience, and come to the realization that Opera is bending over backwards for them and to thank the developers all they can do is bitch.

Personally, why should I even care what they think anymore?