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 :)

Tuesday June 16
 
16:34
 
Wow - Opera Unite

How many times have we heard the announcement “X browser is going to change the internet” - but Opera Unite might just do that.

Opera Unite: a Web server on the Web browser
With Opera 10, we are introducing a new technology called Opera Unite, radically extending what you are able to do online. Opera Unite harnesses the power of today’s fast connections and hardware, allowing all of us to help define the future landscape of the Web, one computer at a time.

Take control of what you share online
Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.

Share with other Web browsers
What if you use Opera at home, and a different Web browser at work? Opera Unite services can be accessed from any modern browser, including mobile browsers! At home, just select what you want to share, and you can view it later using your work Web browser without any problems.

Monday April 6
 
11:00
 
The Evolution Of Communication

Nice one Time.

Twitter: Where people who don’t have enough going on in their lives go to write drivel to make themselves think they are important.

(I’m just jealous because I can’t access twitter from work and so have to blog my drivel here instead!)

Monday March 30
 
00:31
 
Do You Want To Miss Your Chance To Cringe At The Stupidity Of The Person Who Made This Advertisement? Yes/No/Cancel?

Thursday March 26
 
08:45
 
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