It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a blog post, but nothing that impressed me this much hasn’t happend in the past year. Also I’m very active on Twitter you can follow me there.
Enough with the introduction , let’s cut tot the chase.
Since I don’t follow too many tech sites (mostly because I’m lazy and always forget to add them to the feedreader) I visit those websites from time to time. This morning I opened Engadget and suddenly I was like O_O . There were news about Opera 10, and as the title said: Opera Unite: a cloud-based promise to ‘reinvent the web,’ again
I was puzzled . I didn’t know what was that all about. Since I’m a diehard Opera fan and quite a curious person, I read the article, I watched the youtube video and fell in love with the concept: Opera Unite.
The next second I downloaded the beta, and began playing with the features. The more I advanced throughout the new features, the more enthusiastic I became.
So what is this all about. I will try to write my impression of it and what I think it is.
Opera Unite is a service that facilitates peer-to-peer sharing of files, media, photos, together with a chat hosted on your pc and a place where people can leave “post-its” on your “fridge” (which is also hosted on your pc). Opera Unite also has a simple web server , which runs exclusively on your pc. Opera unite just serves the links to the world, all the content being located on your pc. I think of Unite as a great sharing tool, which can make your work easier, you ability to enjoy sharing things with friends, all in one place, without having to use multiple services hosted in different places.
I already tested all the features of the great new version and I’m very impressed.
The first thing that came to my mind was the new power that is give to Linux users who are greatly dissadvantaged by out-of-date apps (eg. Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, etc.) because of the lack of company interest in this market. Opera has always been devoted to all operating systems, and the browser is the same everywhere. The new features will help a linux user share files easier than before (since file transfer on most protocol is slow or unsupported).
So the big features of Opera Unite are :
- File sharing — secure, peer-to-peer file sharing , directly from your computer
- Web server — a simple web server hosted on you pc
- Media player — listen and share your music collection
- Photo sharing — share your photos into a nice gallery with ease, directly from your pc
- Lounge — an ajax chat hosted directly on your computer
- Fridge — a fridge door where people can leave you notes
Along with Opera Unite, Opera 10 has some great new features that include:
- HTML email composing
- Visual tabs — a very nice feature with which you can see your tabs as thumbnails, and still use them as tabs
- Opera Dragonfly — an improved version of dragonfly. (I personally think it’s VERY close to firebug. I’m ditching firefox soon, for good)
- A new default theme — More shiny , not as dark as the last one, I personally like it better
- Opera Turbo — For those unfortunate to have a slow internet connection, Opera Turbo saves bandwith and makes browsing faster
- Automatic Updates
- Inline spellchecker — I used this in emails, it’s PRETTY good, and it has a ton of dictionaries
Overall it’s a wonderfull piece of software (I wouldn’t have written this post if it wasn’t) with which I’m very impressed. Even though it’s beta, it seems pretty stable to me. But hey, we have automatic updates now, right?
Download Opera 10
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