dW

Entr’Acte 2.0 Beta

seven Responses (now closed)

I’ve finally updated my skin for use with Kestrel. The new skin uses features only Kestrel supports in skins, but better of all it has a completely custom icon set, a set I’ve worked on off and on for about 3 months now. It is of my opinion for Opera to even begin to look native on the Macintosh its icon set should fit in, but in fitting in it should retain its own identity and look. I think I’ve done that.

At the present time I’ve only replaced icons in the default Mac skin, leaving the overall appearance of the skin intact. This is why I am calling this a beta. It’s certainly stable enough for day to day usage, well as stable as Kestrel is on your computer. This is intended as a Macintosh skin, but as far as I can tell (I haven’t tested it) it should work okay on other platforms, maybe perhaps looking a bit odd as the icons might feel out of place on other platforms.

I spent a lot of time on the icons, doing things other developers on the Macintosh do not even do. Most programs on the Mac only have 32×32 icons and the designers do not bother making 24×24 variants of their icons. Well I’ve done more than just that. I’ve created 16×16 icons as well, something Opera can’t take advantage of (yet). I want to write more but Chris wants to go to bed and wants to see what I’m working on.

Well, I’m not going to hold you up anymore. You may download it at http://files.myopera.com/Khadgar/files/Entr’Acte2beta.zip. I’m sorry it won’t autoinstall, but I can’t change mime types on My Opera. I’m waiting for the skin to be accepted by the My Opera mods, so this is all I can do at the moment.

Edit: Fred’s shooed in the skin, so you may download it now in My Opera’s skin section.

I think I Need to Update This Thing

Responses Closed

Lately I haven’t had much to say, so I haven’t updated this log. That’s the hardest thing to do for a log, always having something to talk about. This isn’t intended to be a journal or diary, so I’m not going to go into detail about my day-to-day activities and say how many sheets of toilet paper I used to wipe my butt this morning. Truthfully, lately I’ve been busy with work and my own personal projects. I did take time off to go to Houston for Thanksgiving, my first vacation in… how long? I think it’s been six years.

We left home the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and drove back home that Sunday, so I got quite a bit of time off. I’ve been to Houston numerous times, and I really enjoy it there. It’s quite a bit different than it is here in a small town where we’re lucky to have one of any store, and there are numerous stores we don’t have. Well, one store many probably take granted is Best Buy. Technically we went to Katy which is west of Houston travelling down I-10.

We mostly just spent the time there with my aunt and cousins. On Thanksgiving we ate and watched some football (American Football to all you foreigners). That night we had an interesting situation of trying to get food. Of all the restaurants in Katy there was only a Jack in the Box and a Denny’s open (neither of which we have at home)… heck even Waffle House was closed. On Black Friday my sister and her best friend went shopping and that night we went to see a Houston Aeros AHL hockey game, my first hockey game. For most of the day I relaxed, letting my body turn the food I ate the day before into another layer of succulent fat rolls.

Earlier this year we planned on making a trip to Branson to just get away, neither of us having taken a vacation in some time. We decided to go to Houston instead, so instead of blowing my money on corny shows in Branson I decided to spend some of the money I saved up in the Apple Store that Saturday, having never been to one.

There are two in the Houston area, one in the Memorial City Mall and the other in the Galleria Mall. We decided on the Memorial City one as the Galleria, being a more popular shopping destination would be more full of people. It was an interesting experience, and the store was full of people who were mostly crowded around the MacBooks and the iPhones. What mostly interested me was that there was not a single checkout counter in the store. Instead each employee had a handheld scanner capable of taking a check or credit card. They’d swipe the check or card, hand you the scanner to sign, and it’d print out a receipt. When I walked in I wasn’t sure what I wanted, but I wanted to get at least something even if it was a simple t-shirt (if they even had them). We looked around, and my sister had a fit over the new keyboards. I wasn’t too interested in them, having seen one before. I’m not about to buy one unless I know I’m comfortable typing on one. I could have tried it out then, but I wanted to look around, not sit in front of a computer, something I do most of the time anyway. About 10 times while I was in there a different employee asked us if we needed any help, and most of the time in any store you have to play hide and seek with an employee. After looking around I decided on getting an iPhone as they were on sale that day, $100 off and only in Apple retail stores apparently.

To say I enjoy the phone would be a serious understatement. That’s all that counts in my opinion. Many will love or hate the iPhone either on principle, idiocy, or personal preference just like anything else, but if the iPhone just had a phone and an address book I’d have bought it as many other manufacturers fail to notice the most important feature of their phones is the phone itself. The only thing that would make it better is if there was an Opera for the phone. Perhaps after the API is released this coming February that could be possible. If not that’s fine with me.

The worst thing about this trip is that while I carried my camera with me I didn’t take any pictures. I had such a good time.