We have a little Friday surprise for you, in the form of an update to Opera Dragonfly. Right after publishing Alpha 3, we pushed an update to the cutting-edge path that we are now pushing to the default path.

The update only contains two changes of note, so we will not provide a full changelog this time:

We've added support for the commands clear() and dir( <object> )</object> to the command line. The clear() command clears the command line output, and dir() allows you to inspect an object. For instance, dir( window ) inspects the window.object

The second change is the main reason for pushing this update, and it should vastly improve the Opera Dragonfly experience. By encoding all image resources as data:-URIs, loading of Opera Dragonfly should be much faster. This is especially noticeable for first-time users, and for users on slow networks.

If you are wondering how much faster, let us present a purely anecdotal indication: This release announcement is written on a bus trip to rural Norway. The bus company is kind enough to offer an affordable wifi connection. The connection is fairly slow, and has high latency. Yet, first loading of the new Opera Dragonfly in a clean Opera profile is faster on this bus, than loading the old version from within Opera's own network.

We hope you will enjoy this little Friday update of Opera Dragonfly, and the much-improved loading experience. Please let us know what you think of this minor update.

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We’ve got a couple of announcments related to Opera Dragonfly today. The first piece of news is that Opera Dragonfly alpha 3 has just been released. The main focus of this release has been fixing reported bugs, to make the user experience more pleasant. We’ve also added localisation support—which was introduced in the previous weekly release. The German translation is ready, and we are working on other locales, that will be pushed live as they are completed and QA'd. We hope this will make Opera Dragonfly more useful in the none-English speaking world. Obviously markets where Opera is more popular have high priority, such as Russian and Indonesian.

One of the key new features of Opera Dragonfly alpha 3 is DOM editing support. There is two modes. The first mode allows you to edit, add and delete attributes and text nodes in real time. You can activate this by double clicking on a attribute, value or text node. The second mode allows you to do free form editing, such as adding new DOM node. You can activate this by double clicking on the opening or closing tag of a element. This will turn the entire element and its children into a free form text field. There is currently a known issue with the first mode, where focus doesn't leave the editing mode when pressing the enter/return key. This will be silently updated as soon as it is fixed.

The other main new feature is that the breadcrumb trail has been updated. Now each node acts like a button, so you can navigate the element hierarchy more easily.

The next release will be Opera Dragonfly alpha 4, which is under heavy development. This has been under development at the same time as alpha 3, as it requires new features found in the Scope module that is part of the upcoming Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine. It will refine the user experience some what, as the currently active tab will be detected. This will tidy up the layout and make the docked mode much more logical to navigate. It will also introduce a HTTP inspector.

The way experimental releases are handled has also changed. Now instead of switching to the path for weekly releases, Opera Dragonfly will detect if you are on a stable release version of Opera or a pre-released version, such as an alpha, beta, or weekly release. If you are using a stable release it will use the latest official release of Opera Dragonfly (currently alpha 3). If you are using a pre-released version of Opera it will automatically updated to the latest experimental version of Opera Dragonfly. It is possible to force the use of a stable or experimental version. This is explained in the URL Schema document.

In further Opera Dragonfly news, we now have a person who is focusing on Project Management for Opera Dragonfly. I’ve been handling Product Management, but the Project Manager role has been vacant. The new Project Manager is Arve Bersvendsen, whom many of you may know already. He will bring a great deal of experience and knowledge into the project. I’ll let him introduce himself further in this blog when we have some more news to tell. For now, have fun playing with the latest release.

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We’ve just put the latest build of Opera Dragonfly on the weekly branch. New for this release is the infrastructure for localisation. We have plans to release Opera Dragonfly in a number of languages, and this release is focused on testing the infrastructure we’ve put in place. It is supplied with test localisations in Japanese and German. These localisations are examples and not the finalised text for those languages. Opera Dragonfly will load the required language file, depending on the language of your browser.

After this release we are focusing on testing the features added to the new version of the Scope protocol, which will be included in Core-2.2. We need to make sure these work and there are no major bugs before Core-2.2 goes into code freeze. As such there will be no weeklies for a while, until that work has been carried out. After this we can start working on the rest of the features planned for alpha 3, including DOM editing.

The next version of Scope should improve the user experience considerably as Opera Dragonfly will be able to detect the currently focused tab or window, which means there will be less steps to start up. We hope to also allow the user to select an element n the page and have Opera Dragonfly go straight to that element in the DOM inspector. We will also have the basics of the HTTP inspector.

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Following the Release Candidate last week, Opera Dragonfly alpha 2 has now gone live. People using the default URL for Opera Dragonfly will automatically upgraded to this new version. As always, you can access Opera Dragonfly alpha 2 by clicking on Tools -> Advanced -> Developer Tools in Opera 9.5’s menu bar.

Along with the new features, such as CSS editing, that were introduced in the last post on this blog, we've also released schemas and JSDocs for the code structure and source code. This should make it easier for developers to pick up the source code and start playing with it. I'd be interested to see what people can come up with to improve Opera Dragonfly. If you have any questions about the code, want to post some adaptions or give feature requests then head over to our forums.

The next step is to work on the bugs and planned features for alpha 3 in a few months time.

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We've just released the Release Candidate for Opera Dragonfly alpha 2. New features added since the initial alpha include auto-complete for the Command Line (including object inspection), docked window mode, CSS editing including auto-complete, and a downloadable debug menu. There has also been many bug fixes and stability improvements.

Support for editing and a single window mode have been two of the three most requested features for Opera Dragonfly. The third was HTTP inspection, but this requires Core support to expose the required information through Scope, and will require the next version of our Core rendering engine. Alpha 2 will debut experimental support for the first two features.

Currently only CSS editing is supported, but much of the code can be reused for DOM editing for alpha 3. CSS can currently be edited by clicking on a property or value in the styles sidebar. User defined values are editable, but not the browser default values. Pressing tab will move to the next token (and shift-tab for the previous token). Pressing the up or down arrows on the keyboard activates auto-complete, that will cycle through the valid values. Typing co then the down arrow when a property is highlighted will suggest color for example. Pressing the up or down arrow on a value will increase or decrease the value. All changes are live and instant, so it is incredibly useful for testing tweaks and colour or size changes. I find it very useful when using HSL colour values for example, to get the exact shade I want to use. When at the end of a line or when the value is highlighted, pressing return will create a new property.

The docked window mode is now default, but can be changed to a separate window by pressing the icon next to the close button in the top right corner of the Opera Dragonfly UI. The UI for the docked mode is still very experimental as the support came at the end of the Opera 9.5 development phase. The UI will be improved to make it less confusing in alpha 3.

Command Line auto-complete has already been mentioned in this blog, and can be activated by pressing the tab key. If an object is returned it is highlighted and can be clicked on. Doing this will allow the object to be inspected in the Inspection sidebar. A debug menu has also been released to complement Opera Dragonfly, which currently packages existing Opera features that are useful to developers, along with links to reference materials and validators. This will be improved upon in the future to add new functionality. It can be downloaded on the Opera Dragonfly web site.

Once alpha 2 is released there will be a break while the lead developer takes a much deserved holiday, then work will resume on Opera Dragonfly alpha 3. This should include more bug fixes, DOM editing, support for localisation, UI work and more.

You can test out the release candidate of alpha 2 by entering https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly into the Developer Tools URL of opera:config and pressing the save button. Please give us feedback in the usual places.

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Today we are releasing the ‘Debug Menu’ targeted at all you web developers out there. This menu is meant to complement Opera Dragonfly and provide web developers with a better experience with performing common tasks.

The goal of the debug menu is to bring developer specific functionality already present in the browser in one place, further enhanced with some extra features and reference materials.

Extra features include:

• Open Opera Dragonfly (you might find this easier, instead of going to tools->advanced->developer tools every time you want to open Opera Dragonfly)
  
• Validate HTML5
  
• Validate CSS2.1 and CSS3
  
• Get an Accessibility and Section 508 report.
  
• Check for broken links.
  
• Check how your page will display in Opera Mini
  
• Check the rendering mode of your page
  
• Reload all images (without reloading the page).
  
• Check Alexa rank and Compete.com traffic analysis
  
• Documentation on HTML4.01, CSS2.1, XPath, XSLT and Unicode.
  
• Check WHOIS information
  

How to install
Just click here to download the Menu.

Requirements
It should be used in the latest Opera 9.5 beta build. You can download the latest Opera 9.5 beta build from here.

Customize and build on it

Check out the links below on how to make your own .ini file for a custom menu. You can use the same information to edit this .ini file and add/remove/change the settings.

http://operawiki.info/EditingINIFiles
http://operawiki.info/AdvancedToolbarINIGuide

You are not limited by just this Menu. You can download other toolbars, menus and setups as well, that are made by Opera fans.

Have fun with the menu!

Newest Opera Dragonfly Weekly now live
You can download build 08-06-09-15-30. Bug fixing was the major focus of this weekly release, and here is changelog detailing all the fixes.

One of the major changes is that now Opera Dragonfly can remember its state. Attached or detached.

As mentioned in previous posts as well, automatically updated weekly builds can be found at https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly/. Update the URL by going to Opera:Config -> Developer Tools -> Developer Tools URL . This way you can always automatically get the latest updates.



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We've just released the latest weekly release of Opera Dragonfly. The biggest change over the previous build is that it now works in a panel, which allows Opera Dragonfly to work in a single window. This has been one of the biggest requests from users. A recent Opera 9.5 build is required for this to work. You can download this from the Desktop Team blog. The support for this is still highly experimental, so the interface is far from complete, and will change. The style sheets view is still under construction for example. There will likely be a number of regressions.

Another change is in how we fetch scripts in the JavaScript debugger. The page will now automatically refresh, so you don't have to click the reload button. As this can cause loss of state, there is an option in the preferences, to disable this and return to the previous behaviour. A full list of changes can be found in the change logs.

Download build 08-06-02-16-10. Automatically updated weekly builds can be found at https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly/. Update the Opera Dragonfly URL in Opera:config to this address to enable automatic updates to the latest weekly release.

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The weekly snapshot of Opera Kestrel included a few fixes to bugs that caused issues in Opera Dragonfly. The most prominent one of these is that persistent cache should now work in Opera Dragonfly, enabling offline mode to work as it was designed. This should make Opera Dragonfly much more useful.

Another bug that has been fixed, and should be coming soon, is that Opera Dragonfly will be useable even when JavaScript is turned off. Once this fix lands, it will be possible to debug how your web page or application works without JavaScript

In further news, we are doing our best to try to squeeze the single windowed docked mode into Opera Dragonfly alpha 2. This hopefully wont delay what we've already planned for the second alpha. It wont be the final solution, as we need to do some interaction design work on how it will work differently to the separate window solution. As there is less space to work with, it will likely be more optimal to have a different view. The initial work will likely just make it work in that view, and test out the functionality given to use from the Desktop team.

In a post alpha 2 release, we hope to redesign and optimise the UI somewhat, and work on keyboard accessibility. The ground work for the later has already began. I've been reading up on WAI-ARIA, and it looks like something we can put to good use. As well as making controls accessible to assistive technology, it should make our keyboard navigation work more like a native application for those controls. There are a number of roles for components that stand out instantly as useful for Opera Dragonfly, including tree, and treeitem for the DOM source code tree, toolbar, button, search and perhaps checkbox for the toolbars, tabpanel for the tabs, breadcrumbs for the DOM path and so on. It looks like ARIA should be something that isn't too difficult to learn or apply.

One of the great things about developing Opera Dragonfly in Web technologies (except being a useful exercise in finding Opera bugs), is that we can design only for the Web standards provided by the Core-2.1/Opera 9.5 platform. Opera has one of the most advanced support for Web standards in the industry, and we don't have to care if they are supported yet in another browser. I'm specifically talking about Web standards here, not vendor only solutions, that will cause lock-in. We can use Opera Dragonfly as a showcase of what is possible with the likes of accessibility on the Web. My next mission is to try to get the team to use SVG images in the interface. With SVG we can make the backgrounds of buttons as a reusable element (styleable through CSS SVG profile), use a CSS sprite to reduce the HTTP traffic, and zip as SVGZ to reduce the file size even further than what SVG would already give you. SVG will also allow the button styles to be programatically changed. An example could be detecting the platform and changing the button shapes or colours accordingly. This is not something we've planned yet, but is certainly something that is possible when we don't have to care about IE.

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We have just released our first weekly build of Opera Dragonfly today. These are development snap shots and are not guaranteed to be stable, or even work at all. The weekly builds are released to get feedback and testing of the latest changes. If you'd like to report issues please go to the Opera Dragonfly feedback page.

Weekly snap shots will appear on the URL https://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly and should automatically update when a new version comes out. The snapshots can be downloaded at http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/weekly/zips/. The regular shipped url will update when official releases are updated.

There have been a number of bug fixes since the first alpha. A list can be found in the change logs. The most notable new features are Command Line completion and the Object Inspector. If you press the tab key when using the Command Line, it will auto-complete the first match. Pressing tab again will cycle through the matches. If you enter a command that returns a Object, you will be able to click on it and inspect the Object in the Object Inspector. This is located in a tab next to the Frame Inspector. Developing this functionality highlighted bugs in recent builds of the Opera Browser, so there are known issues with these features. Entries in the Object Inspector will not expand for example.

Progress is still on course for a second alpha release in the not too distant future. A desktop build will also be released soon that will fix the issues with Opera Dragonfly not working in offline mode, due to a bug with persistent cache not working over HTTPS. We're looking forward to you trying out this and subsequent weekly builds, and any feedback or bug reports that you send.

In somewhat related news, Opera also announced the launch of the Opera Widgets SDK this week. Opera Widgets can be debugged using Opera Dragonfly, and the SDK includes a useful Widgets Emulator for emulating how Widgets will look on different types of devices. Widgets currently work on devices such as the Nintendo Wii and ARCHOS, and upcoming UIQ 3.3 mobile phones. Widgets are currently Opera only, but we are standardising the spec at the W3C and will change our implementation to match the spec when it is finalised. We are also standardising the File I/O API spec at the W3C. This is a new API we have developed to access the file system, and is very useful for Widgets.

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Opera Dragonfly is just over a week old, and I think we can say the early signs are we had a successful launch. It was ready and launched on time, except some gremlins in the server which took a few minutes to sync the development version of the web site with the live site. We got a lot of coverage both in the media and on blogs. We made TechCrunch (and Washington Post), Wired, Digital Web and Ajaxian among others.

I've been trawling the Web for feedback, as part of our team meeting today, to discuss the Beta 1 roadmap. In general the feedback has been positive and understanding that the release was a first alpha. Much of the feedback for feature requests were already on our current roadmap, so I'm hopeful that by the time we hit final, we will have a very useful tool for Web developers. Speed has been a concern, but Opera Dragonfly isn't fully optimised yet, and improvements in Scope, which may come for Beta 1, should help. Currently JSON is not fully supported for everything in Scope, and we find that JSON is much faster currently than XML for communicating between Opera Dragonfly and Scope.

While responding to feedback in the Opera Dragonfly forums, I noticed my first (external) patch. Azamadt Smaguloff (from Kazakhstan) posted a patch on the forums to enable autocomplete in the Command Line. I've not had time to check how this works yet, but this feature is something I've noticed a few people have requested. I think it is fantastic the developers are already interested enough to add to Opera Dragonfly themselves. We don't current take in external check-ins into the official branch, but that doesn't mean we never will.

Things are currently on track for our second alpha, which should (all going well) include inline editing, infrastructure for localisation and bug fixes. Once editing works, that should make the CSS Inspector much more useful for designers.

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Today we released the first alpha of our new web developer tool. The objective for this first alpha release is to get feedback and of course allow you to start using it. You should expect it to be buggy and even missing some key features, but that is what alpha means.

It is however not entirely correct that we are releasing the tool early in the development. The foundation for Opera Dragonfly has been worked on for more than two years. The phases we have completed so far are:

• Interviews with web developers how they use developer tools and how they would like such a tool to be.
• Early prototype for DOM inspector and DOM snapshot.
• Implementation of the Scope protocol in Presto (Supported in Core 2.1 and later).
• Support for Dragonfly in Opera 9.5 beta 2.
• Feature development for JavaScript debugger and CSS/DOM inspector.

We do believe the foundation for the tool is very strong and that we are building a tool that will become a popular choice among developers. Most importantly we have designed Opera Dragonfly from scratch to be able to debug web applications on remote devices, something we believe will be key moving forward.

The road ahead

The next major release we have planned is alpha 2. This will be completed before the final version of Kestrel (Opera 9.5) is released. The focus for alpha 2 is:

• improved handling of threads in the JavaScript debugger
• inline CSS editing
• infrastructure for localization
• improved remote debugging

But for now — Happy testing!

- The Opera Dragonfly team

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