Wednesday June 17
 
17:11
 
Opera Unite Has Awesome Potential

I set up Opera Unite last night. It’s very easy to set up, but you can see it’s an alpha. Here are some of the limitations I found:

• No https so passwords for password protected sections are clear text
• There’s no way to hide which services are running, which leaves you prone to hacking. ie. If you tell someone you’re running a chat service, they can automatically see you’re running other services also.
• There’s no way to administer remotely – eg, if you want to change an access password or add a new lounge.
• Names of services can be changed, but after renaming The Lounge, a “broken” version will remain in the services list.
• If you close the browser, all services stop – there’s no option to leave Opera running in the background, and you can’t iconify the browser to the system tray. This means Opera always has to remain running and take up space in the taskbar
• Photo browser doesn’t handle RAW files – would be good if it displayed the embedded JPEG
• Can’t play music to an iphone because there’s no flash
• Doesn’t work properly on the super modern IE6 (which I am forced to use at work)
• On Firefox 3 (portableapps.com version), after starting to play a song you are returned to the top of the music tree
• Photo folders are large icons only and filename gets truncated, which makes it difficult to navigate. There’s also no search.
• Webserver doesn’t have PHP or MySQL

But, this is alpha – you expect issues. All in all, Opera Unite is very cool and very promising:

• You can write your own Opera Unite services, which means you can bet your bottom dollar that other services will be coming soon, ala appstore.
• You can hack customise services easily. For example, the home screen can be “customised” by renaming installdirectory/unite/home.us to have home.zip, unzipping it, editing the files, zipping, and renaming back to home.us. Cool, huh? By doing that I can hide the list of services running (#2 above)
• Can run it on multiple machines – once you have your operaunite domain name (same as your my.opera.com id), each machine becomes a subdomain named as you choose. eg. party.myname.operaunite.com, work.myname.operaunite.com
• You can install the same service multiple times – so you can have multiple chat rooms, or share multiple directories, or have different passwords
• With minimal setup – pointing it at the right directory and adding a password, I have access to my entire photo library wherever I am. I’ve just renewed my Flickr Pro account but maybe I wont need to next year.

Now all I need is the iPhone to get Flash or someone to hack the media server so that it links to MP3s, and then I can stream music to my iPhone. I tried pointing the file sharing service at some MP3s hoping that would get the iPhone to play, but it didn’t seem to.

Some see Opera Unite as a gimmick that will drift into nothing. For me it’s already useful – I now have access to my entire photo library without uploading it to Flickr. And next time my brother can’t send me videos by Gmail because they are too large, I’ll just get him to install Opera Unite, start the file sharing service, and give me the URL.

If the services expand and Opera sets-up Unite to run even when no browser window is open, Unite could really change the web. You’ve got to try it.

Funnily, it’s not made me use Opera as a web browser though. I’m still using Chrome :)