I think this service is quite cool, just try it.

More info at Gitorious.

As the tile of this blog is 'Martin on WPF and .NET' I will in the future post other stuff on martinrauscher.posterous.com.

Thinking about it I realized this could be far cooler than everyone else though. Of course people soon realized that Unite is technically cool. But everybody (including Opera itself) only published and showed services that already existed and simply worked as every other web server, too.

The new idea

What nobody seemed to realize is that Unite is a fully customizable peer to peer architecture! With the help of the MyOpera username it's possible to connect to everyone you know!

Unite United = U2

The new service that I envision, that would unite (therefore Unite United) you with all your friends, would work like this:

You simply enter a list of MyOpera Usernames as your friends. As soon as the service starts it searches via the Unite URL what friends are online. For those friends that are online it authenticates itself. (This would work quite simply with a 3-way handshake with some random numbers and could work via HTTPS through the Unite proxy.)

From that moment on you have real-time connections to all of your friends. (One of the biggest technically difficulties for Google Wave.)

Now this service could be extendible with anything you like. Concurrent document editing, direct file sharing while chatting or even a distributed facebook clone. And all this without making everything you have public and not needing passwords to be save.

Problems

There is still no overview page at http://username.operaunite.com/ where one could see which devices are online. And there is no HTTPS support, what is big problem when authenticating other users.

Oh and the biggest problem is of course that the proxy totally SUCKS. I'm getting thrown out all the time...

Conclusions

I think social and interactive peer to peer services are the only possible future for Opera Unite. Most people close their browser when they are finished surfing. That's just the way they think about a browser.

The Unite service page doesn't show a single interesting new service until today. I think this shows that a traditional web server is simply nothing interesting any more...

Who wants to try?

I won't have time within the next months to try my ideas presented here. Therefore everything presented may be used at your will as long as you mention my name somewhere :)

Visual Tabs

Do I have to say more?

Not an Opera first, but still great and it is good to see that Opera isn't afraid of using good features they didn't invent.

Better Speed Dial

You finally can configure the size and background of the Speed Dial! Great!

Stuff that was already in the Alpha Snapshots:

Opera Turbo

If you have an UMTS Stick but no Data flat then you'll love this! Once switched on it takes all traffic to Opera's servers and compresses them for you, so you don't have to waste bandwidth. (Beware that compressed pictures look of course a little worse.)

SPEED

The most important aspect of a browser for me is really big here

Other new features

• Opera Turbo
• Automatic updates
• Crash logging
• Inline spelling checker
• 100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
• Significantly improved performance, particularly on CSS/HTML rendering
• Opera Mail HTML Compose support

The good the bad but no ugly

Pros: Opera keeps being the best browser in the world (for me). The new skin is really nice. Plus everything I already wrote above.

Cons: When upgrading from an Alpha it crashed on me and I had to do a clean install. (Should have done anyway...) The skin isn't complete, therefore the visual tabs don't work when placed on the left like I do. (Great for wide screens.) Visual Tabs need far too much space at the top. Normal people that have a normal Notebook have a resolution of 1280x800 - there is nut much left for the website...

All in all Opera is still the best browser on earth, but this doesn't mean it couldn't be improved...

Links

• Opera 10 Beta
• Desktop Team
• Standards Support

Come back tomorrow for my review.

Opera has started an affiliate program...

I still hope for an Opera 10 Beta release this week... :)

My data isn't this sensitive, but you know, it just feels bad...

But I just found (via http://alternativeto.net/) a new application that will fill this gap: SpiderOak

They say "Engineering Matters" and created a system that has truly zero-knowledge of your data. Just great! (For more info just go to their site...)

Another thing that SpiderOak does better than Dropbox is that you can backup/sync any folder, not just those under your "My Dropbox" folder...
And you can share whole folders.

The only thing that I now use Dropbox for is fast publishing of single files. Just dropping something into your public folder and then right click -> "copy public link" is really nice thing, but I guess it's just a matter of time until SpiderOak has this, too :)

PS: Another reason why I like this company, is because they gave a whole 50GB for free, because I helped them a little bit :)

PPS: This is my first post with Windows Live Writer, let's see if this works...
Edit: Well special characters have problems...

Copy Public Link for SpiderOak: I created something

When you look at our ever more evolving web applications you can clearly see that this simply was never thought to be the task of HTML. Most of all apps are somewhat datacentric, and while with css you can quite nicely separate this content from its design it's still kind of botch. And at least when you look at apps like Google Spreadsheet you can see, that Javascript can do much, but it is too much constricted by the DOM and the whole way you have to do dynamic things.

So, obviously we have a problem there with currently only one solution: Plugins

But we don't like plugins. But why?

Well I think the main reasons are that they kill the open nature of the web. They are proprietary (what I personally don't find too bad), you don't know what they really do and you have to install extra software.

While reading Dave's article I thought, maybe the only real problem is the extra software thing. I mean, have a look at Silverlight or its open implementation Moonlight:
They built upon XAML, a XML derivate, and any programming language you like. C# is even an ISO standard. And then the whole thing is compiled and packed into ZIP file that is renamed to *.xap.

But now imagine the following scenario: We build the whole Moonlight package, including an compiler, into our browser, remove the compilation step from above, so that we still have the open source code, and just have to compile it on the fly, and then package everything up again in a ZIP file!

Think about it!

This only builds upon open technologies. We save bandwidth, because everything is compressed, it's all in a single file and we don't have to HTML format our data. And when you have a look at current Silverlight or Flash pages you can clearly see what a huge potential such a web would have!

Just think about it and tell me your ideas, maybe there is something I didn't think about...

IT JUST WORKS!^tm

If you are interested: Please refer me!

UPDATE: Please see my new blog post about SpiderOak.

Now, have a look at these two pictures:

The only difference from (1) to (2) is, that i scrolled maybe 5px down...

I have SnapsToDevicePixels activated for the whole application, and it looks like this has some rounding errors sometime... If you didn't see it, I'm using an DropShadowEffect the show the currently selected item, and as I wrote previously This DISABLES SnapsToDevicePixels. But interestingly I can't see a difference in text rendering in the good case...

Do you have any ideas why this happens?