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Oldest known version of this page was edited on 2005-10-29 15:05:05 by SpW? []

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The New Appearance Dialog

Anyone who has ever worked with Opera knows that you can change the user interface to your liking. There are hardly any restrictions. Before Opera 8, all options concerned were hidden behind menu options, keyboard shortcuts, context menus and the Preferences dialog. Finally, this new release brings almost all of them together in a dialog called Appearance.

This was the old situation:

1. To change the type of advertisements shown in Opera's banner, go to Preferences > Advertising; to remove the banner completely, enter a registration key in Help > Register Opera.
2. To change Opera's language, go to Preferences > Languages.
3. To choose a different skin, go to View > Skins (or take the long road via Preferences).
4. A color scheme can be selected in Rightclick toolbar > Customize > skin > colour scheme.
5. To switch between an MDI and an SDI enviroment, go to Preferences > Windows.
6. The position of toolbars and panels is set by right-clicking on them and selecting Customize toolbars.... In older versions of Opera, each toolbar had a Placement submenu in its context menu, much like the Panel and the Panel selector still had in 7.54.
7. Finally, buttons and fields can be dragged from the Customize toolbars dialog (or from a website offering custom buttons) to any enabled toolbar that accepts them. Removing them requires a right-click: Remove from toolbar.

Opera 8 implicitly distinguishes between options that you will probably use only once and those that you may use more often as you learn more about the program. The first category consists of Advertisements/Registration, Language and MDI/SDI (items 1, 2 and 5 from the list above, respectively). They can still be found in Preferences (CTRL+F12 or Tools > Preferences...). Registration information can be entered via Help > Register Opera. Nothing much has changed here.

The second category is for the hobbyists: buttons and fields, toolbars and panels, skins and color schemes have all gathered in Appearance (SHIFT+F12 or Tools > Appearance...). It simply makes more sense to have these regularly used user interface options in one dialog. This is undoubtedly better than how it was before: you could for example select the panel placement by right-clicking on the panel selector, but you had to open the Customize toolbars dialog to edit its Style or Wrapping. Also, didn't you think it was a bit strange to get a Skins submenu in the context menu of every toolbar?

The new "customization center" may seem complicated at first sight — it is certainly more densely populated by buttons and checkboxes — but it adds to the consistency of Opera's design. And once you've used it, you'll find that there's nothing to it, really.

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