"Smart Back" button for Opera

You know that: You go to a web gallery for example and open new images. You try the back button and nothing happens. Then you notice that the image opened in a new tab. So you close it to get back.

Well this was something I hated because I had to think whether I opened something in new tab or not. So I begged Opera developers to create better back button that would close the new window if there was no step back possible. Well Opera still has not the "Smart Back".

But fortunately Opera is pretty customizable and allows you to bind custom commands to keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures and even create custom buttons. So I created one that doesn't work perfectly, but it's closer to the "Smart Back" button that the default one.

The behaviour can be emulated by this command "Back | Close page & Switch to previous page". You can assign it to the left mouse gesture, to ctrl+left keyborad stortcut or to any other. I have created the "Smart Back" button for you. Just click the following link and add the button to the toolbar.

Smart Back Button download

And here is how to setup Opera's mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts:

First, check the "Open new tab next to active" check box:

Then go to shortcuts category and choose "Edit" for both mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts:
Add "Back | Close page & Switch to previous page" to column actions instead of "Back" to GestureLeft:
Replace all keyborad shortcuts previously contaning "Back" with "Back | Close page & Switch to previous page":

New Opera 9.5 "Kestler" alpha

EDIT [en]: A good friend of mine noted that I haven't placed link to the best czech (as I'm from the Czech Republic) website about Opera - so here it is www.operacesky.net

EDIT [cz]: Jeden kamarád poznamenal, že bych sem měl dát link na nejlepší českou stránku o Opeře - takže tady je www.operacesky.net

Opera has released new 9.5 version of their browser. This version is only in alpha stage of development, so don't install it over the current version, because 9.5 is not yet for daily use. This post is already written form the 9.5. The hugest difference I noticed after several seconds of browsing is much improved speed, but there is list of other major changes:

• rewritten ECMAScript (JavaScript) engine
• history search (when typing address, your history is full-text searched for words you type in address bar)
• synchronization with Opera server (every Opera on every computer you use will have the same bookmarks, speed dial, etc.)
• restoring closed windows
• 64bit version for Linux
• VoiceOver support on MacOS X
• mail improvements (underhood)

Read more here: http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/alfa/alfa.dml

Wisit Opera's desktop team blog: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/

Download here:

Windows: http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/o950a1_9500_en.exe

MacOS X: http://snapshot.opera.com/mac/o950a1_4404.dmg

Unix: http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/9.50-Alpha-1/

Content Aware Image Resizing

Content aware image resizing is a new way how to resize images. Everybody knows how common resizing works (image just gets smaller or larger). The problem is when you want to change the image aspect ratio to fit the image to some given dimensions. This would usually lead to croping the image (sacrificing part of it's content).
Content aware resizing shows that there is another way how to do that. It generaly keeps the "important" content unresized and shrinks or expands only the "unimportant" content. This means that the "important" content keeps it's aspect ratio (for example people won't be unnaturally thin or fat). The importance of every area is generally decided by how much the color varies in the every area, expecting that the unimportant areas are not so "colorful".
Watch the video to see what can be done with the software. The project looks very interesting and the idea is great. Do you think this technology has a future?

Brain-twisters worth wasting time with

I have encountered few really cool brain-twisters I spent some time playing with. They have both very simple rules and that's reason why I like them. If you like logic games I'm sure you'll like these games too. I'm glad that Flash made it so simple for people to develop simple games that almost anyone can bring his/her ideas to public. So enjoy.

Removing diacritics (accents) from String in Java

Yesterday I was working on uploading files in my CMS. The file should be downloadable using nice path containing file original file name. The problem is that not all file names can safely be used. For example I wouldn't like to use file name "Výroční zpráva 2007", but I would like to replace it with something like "vyrocni-zprava-2007".

Well how to do it in Java elegantly? I will skip replacing spaces with dashes and lower casing the name as it should be clear and simple. The naive way is to replace all characters containing diacritics using String.replaceAll() method similarly to replacing spaces. The code would look like this:

public static String getPath(String name) {

return name.toLowerCase().replaceAll("[\\s]+", "").

replaceAll("[áàâ]", "a").

replaceAll("[èéêëě]","e").

... a lot of other similar lines ...

}

Well this would essentially work. But when I was think of writing something like that, I was thinking like: "That would look pretty lame and PHP-like and Java is much more advanced language except everything else also with core Unicode support. There must be a way how to write it better."

Except looking lame, the above code has also several disadvantages. The most obvious it that you would have to explicitly name every character with diacritics and that can be difficult as many languages have their own special characters. For example Swedish has characters like 'å', 'ö', 'ä', or Czech (my native language) has characters like 'ě', 'š', 'ř', 'ž', 'ý', 'ú' and even such stupid character as 'ů'. You would have to know languages pretty well to be able to name all the characters.

The other disadvantage is that such code would run pretty slowly as the complexity grows with number of characters you are finding to replace. I don't know a lot of languages, but I guess the number of such characters can even hit 100 mark.

So because of that I decided to look for better solution and the obvious place to start was java.text package. And this is what I got:

// you need to import java.text.*

public static String getPath(String name) {

name = name.toLowerCase().replaceAll("[\\s]+", "");

Normalizer.normalize(name, Normalizer.Form.NFD).

replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "");

}

So what does the code do? Firstly it replaces spaces and lower-cases the string. The second line decomposes every character with diacritics to more characters where the first is the character without diacritics, followed by characters representing the diacritics. As all characters representing diacritics are from specific Unicode range they can be easily replaced with single and simple replaceAll() method call.

So what are the disadvantages of the code? It works in 1.6 only. As alternative you can use sun.text.Normalizer available also in 1.5, however that doesn't lead to very portable code and would cause problems on Mac OS X for example.

Plans for future development

Well, I'm finalizing the very first alpha version of my new CMS I'm developing for about four months now. So I decided to share a few plans of mine for the nearest future (next school year). As you may think the first thing is to finish the CMS, which I think will be really cool and will change the way people use CMS (but that's probably very optimistic :-) ). The CMS is Java-based, uses Hibernate for persistence and is designed to run in Tomcat. I have still a lot of work to be done to solve many issues from missing features to performance, but I'm quite happy with the results I'm getting now. So I made some time to write this post. The sad thing for most of you is probably the fact that it won't be open source probably. And I can't even tell you the features of CMS as it's "confidential". However one part of the CMS will be open source. The part is the templating system code-named FinalShape. FinalShape is templating system slightly similar to Apache Velocity. Unlike Velocity FinalShape is directly designed for being used in web environment. FinalShape is in fact alternative for JSP, ServerFaces, Servlets and similar stuff. Unlike servlets and similar FinalShape templates can't contain any executable code and can be safely used by non programmers to design HTML websites. In the CMS (I'm working on) web designer can safely change the template from the administration interface in runtime without any redeployment needed.

From other features I consider important are already implemented:

• internationalization and localization support on template engine level
• compilation of templates avoiding re-parsing templates again and again
• 2-level caching (cached are both compiled form of templates and rendered pages)
• compression support (all cached pages are compressed and passed to browser compressed if browser supports HTTP compression, otherwise the page is uncompressed before passing to browser - this minimizes memory used by cache and minimizes traffic)
• structured documents support (nested blocks)
• commonly used built-in page elements and possibility to implement custom elements
• many other minor features :-)

OK. That sounds good, doesn't it? So when can you expect to download FinalShape and it's source code? - In early 2008. I know that doesn't sound soon, but I have a lot of other stuff to do and FinalShape needs some minor tweaks yet, some source code cleaning and also some documentation to help you start.

I have also another cool project in progress, but I will tell you about it sometime later. I would like it to be my dimploma thesis, so as soon as I find some guarantor and the topic gets public I'll write more about it here.

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I'm sorry for the advertisement here, but I would like to get some money via Google AdSense to pay me part of my time spend by writting this blog, if possible. I think Google AdSense is not very striking and offers quite relevant links. So I hope that it will help you to find something you are really looking for.