Opera Talks: Petter Nilsen

Welcome to Opera Talk, a new column here at Choose Opera where we will hightlight employees and community members.

First of we have Senior Developer in the Desktop team Petter Nilsen. Straight from his holiday, he took time to answer our questions about his favorite features.

Choose Opera: And the feature you most recently discovered?

Petter: I would say User CSS of certain web pages. I use Dragonfly to find which styles are used on a page, then I write my own style sheet to override certain styles. I can make a page look more like I want.

Choose Opera: Seeing how you know a lot about features, care to give us a scoop?

Petter: As you know, Opera 10 adds the possibility of adding more Speed Dial positions, up to a total of 25. 25 has been picked as it seems to be a reasonable maximum number, but users can of course add more by editing the speeddial.ini located in their profile directory.

Another little feature that currently doesn't have a user interface within Opera is the possibility of adding custom transparency to the Speed Dials itself. This can be useful if you have a particularly nice background picture and you want to see more of that and less of the Speed Dials. Quit Opera, open speeddial.ini in a text editor and add:

[UI]
Opacity=50

50 means 50% which means all the Speed Dials will be 50% transparent. You can make them invisible by using 1 as value, but 50-70 seems to be reasonable values. A word of warning though: This is a experimental feature and might or might not be in future versions (but it works in Opera 10 Beta 2). It might also introduce a performance penalty when painting the Speed Dial on some computers and operating systems.

Choose Opera: Thanks! And while we try out that neat trick, we thank Petter for taking the time to chat with us!