About Opera Workshop at KPI

Yesterday was a seminar (or rather a meeting?) Opera at the Kiev Polytechnic University. The first "hot" report was already here . I'm taking the baton, I will try to tell you more.



As already known, Opera was represented by a whole delegation of 3 people: Navjot Pawera (product manager), Uliana Kumenova (distribution manager) and Ilya Shpankov (development manager).
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Just like Haikon at Educamp , the whole presentation is not collected in MS PowerPoint, but in CSS - it hooked me last time, they call it the “Opera Show” . Haakon in the same way wrote a whole book: XHTML + CSS => PDF, yesterday it was also mentioned, but in passing.

We talked about the mobile Internet and the features of displaying pages in it. As far as I understand, Opera now sees the main perspective in it: “The Web is going mobile!” Indeed, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are now considered the most intelligent mobile browsers (somewhere close to Mobile FF, but when it will appear) . In addition, Opera Mobile - the only one of the line, sold for money. So, the main direction of the company's development, I think, is obvious.

They demonstrated Dragonfly + Scope - an analogue of Firebug built into Opera, but with the possibility of remote debug.

Navit promised an animated PNG and showed support for SVG (Scaleble Vector Graphic), which turned out to be the most common XML. At the same time, using simple Java Script with SVG-images, you can do anything at all - both animation and interactive.

Shown using canvas for drawing. Such a development of toys right on Java Script is right on the page :) In general, if things go on like this, Flash will become completely irrelevant.

More focused on the new <video> tag that Haikon mentioned. In general, I absolutely agree with the idea: now the user needs pre-installed players to view media content - this is wrong. Therefore, Opera offers to embed media directly into the page and display it with browser methods. At the same time, everything is displayed quite flexibly - it is free to resize, revert and flip over, filters are applied. (I think all the same Java Script) In any case, even Flash does not allow this now.

At this, in fact, the main presentation ended and we talked about the “Higher Education Support Program” itself . So:

1. In order to teach the maker-ups to write the correct code on the Opera website, a section opens with articles by leading developers on “How to ...”.
2. Opera is looking for representatives in the educational institutions of the world (which has already been mentioned many times ) to interact with students and organize various events.
3. Through these representatives, Opera distributes to universities, absolutely free of charge, its entire line of browsers (which, however, are already bespatnye except Opera Mobile).
4. Opera will invite students for summer practice, internship, work to themselves.

Then there were questions. I think the most interesting is “For what money does Opera exist, if everything is so free?” :) And Ilya complained that this question is asked at every meeting and they are already thinking, is it not time to add it to the presentation. So, it is not a secret at all and moreover - all financial reports for those interested are available on the website.

And now, “A session of black magic with its subsequent debunking”:

1. Search services. That is, for the Google search built into the browser, Yahoo and the rest of Opera pay their tithing.
2. Still Opera Mobile. But retail gives little, the main income is the wholesale purchases of mobile phone manufacturers.
3. Opera for unconventional devices. That is, the browser as an interface in help systems, etc. Ilya even joked: “We hope that sooner or later Opera will be in any device with a screen and keyboard”.

That's all.

Original and more photos - here .