Opera: My Way To Store, Organise and Share Bookmarks

I’ve always been interested in the latest shiny thing so when I was asked to review Opera’s feature-filled latest release, Opera 26, I jumped at the chance.
Opera, like it’s musical counterpart, has always been the choice of aficionados. It doesn’t come included with your operating system and nor is it peddled by the world’s largest search provider. You have to make the conscious choice to be an Opera user. And oh are you rewarded for that choice.

In countless performance tests, Opera comes out ahead. Opera is often the first of the major browsers to implement new features — it had tabbed browsing 6 years before Internet Explorer — and seems determined to continue this tradition. While the gaps have closed between modern browsers — especially when it comes to how they render webpages — there is still room for them to differentiate.
I’ve come to appreciate Opera more and more as I’ve used it. Everyone knows Opera is fast and stable. What I’ve grown to love is the interface and their innovative takes on Speed Dial and Bookmarks.

The Interface

The latest version of Opera is gorgeous. I checked it out on both OS X Yosemite and the Windows 10 Technical Preview, and I really liked how it respected the design conventions of both operating systems. Other browsers are guilty of ignoring the OS style and having the same design across every platform. It’s great to see Opera tweak the design of their browser to fit in with whatever OS you’re running. Few things look uglier than an app that’s clearly designed for one platform being forced to run on another.
1 design Opera: My Way To Store, Organise and Share Bookmarks [MacBook Air and Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro Giveaway]

Aside from the platform specific changes, the underlying design is the same. It’s clean, minimalist and very pretty. There is little to distract you from the web content. The interface of the Speed Dial, Discover and Bookmarks sections is also stunning. They’ve gone with a flat, tile-based design reminiscent of Windows 8. It works great.

Speed Dial

If you’ve ever tried to create a bookmarks bar filled with favicons to quickly navigate between your favourite sites, you’ll know it just doesn’t work. The targets are too small and the bookmarks bar looks ugly and takes up precious screen-space. Opera pioneered Speed Dial back in 2007. It’s a customisable grid on the new tab page for the websites you visit most frequently.
2 speed dial Opera: My Way To Store, Organise and Share Bookmarks [MacBook Air and Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro Giveaway]

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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