Opera Web Browser Widgets I Like, and Tips
There are a lot of cute and genuinely useful little programs called widgets you can download and use in your Opera web browser. This page lists some of the widgets I like, and gives tips for them. If you like this page, then, you also might be interested in my Opera Web Browser Tips page.
The main website for widgets is Widgets.Opera.Com. There, you you can browse and download the tons of widgets that are available. You can reach that website either by clicking the link, or by going to the Widgets menu and selecting the Add widgets menu item.
There's even some way to create your own widgets, but I haven't figured that out yet. If you're interested in that, the Opera Widgets Developers Documentation page might be a good starting point.
Artist's Sketchbook
I'm not really that into visual art, but this is a really nice little program, and happily, unlike so many paint programs, it's not at all hard to figure out.
There doesn't seem to be an undo function - rather like real painting. So, be careful with the Paintbucket tool in particular, since with that, you can easily wipe out everything irretrievably (unless you save a copy of it before you use the Paintbucket on it).
There's also no way to specify specific colors - which is again sort of like real painting, unless you're someone who measures the precise amount of each different-colored paint you're mixing together to get a new color.
GTranslation
This program allows you to translate between many different languages, using either Babelfish or Google Translate.
Very nice, and by right-clicking on the widget and selecting Always on top, you can make the window always stay on top of everything else. It's too bad it's not resizeable, because it can get in the way, especially if you're using 800x600 screen resolution.
That's one reason why you might prefer my French, German and Japanese foreign language web-browsing frames (available in the Languages section). With those, the dictionary features are available in an unobtrusive frame at the left of your web browser window. Also, if you know a bit of HTML, it's possible to customize the appearance of the frames any way you like by editing the HTML source code of my frames.
Screen Ruler
This widget overlays your whole screen with a grid. Click once anywhere on your screen, and it will tell you the X/Y coordinates of where you clicked. Click again anywhere else on your screen, and it will draw a line between the points you clicked, and give you the distance between them.
The Colours of the Rainbow (Color Picker)
This useful little program allows you to easily pick a color and get the various computer codes describing it, such as:
- The color's hexadecimal number. That's useful for web page design, since you can use such values in the source code to name colors you want to use.
- The color's RGB (Red, Green, Blue) values, with each value stated as a number from 0 to 255.
I don't know many things that this is useful for, but I know in Second Life scripting you can relatively easily convert such a set of numbers to a color vector. See the article Color in the LSL Wiki).
- The color's RGB value in percentage format (not sure what that's useful for), and HSV (hue, saturation, value) values, which I'm not sure what they're for either, but perhaps Wikipedia's HSV color space article could help you with that. Just don't trust Wikipedia completely - you never should trust anything from Wikipedia completely, because Wikipedia can be edited by literally anyone.
You can get a copy-and-pasteable version of the codes this program provides by pressing the arrow button at the upper right corner of the widget, then highlighting the text that appears, copying it by pressing Ctrl+C, and pasting it wherever you please by pressing Ctrl+V.
This little program makes it so you won't have to search the web, or open up a behemoth of a program like Adobe Photoshop or The Gimp just to find a color and get the above details.
The only thing this program needs to be really ideal is the ability to click a color you see anywhere on your screen, and have the program automatically give you the details about that color. Guess I'll still have to resort to taking a screen shot using the Print Screen button on the keyboard, and pasting the screenshot into The Gimp for that.
True HTML Editor
This is nice for quickly previewing HTML code you write. (HTML is one of the forms of code used to create web pages - there's a nice, succinct HTML tutorial at AcademicTutorials.com). This widget also has features which will easily generate custom CSS code for you based on a few details you put in.
I don't recommend trying to save your work using the widget, though - I don't know where it ends up and I see no way to get it to load files, so, you might lose stuff if you rely on its Save feature.
So, I recommend always keeping an external text editor like NoteTab Light open, and periodically copying and pasting then saving your work in there.