Donna Fraser | Web Developer

Opera Web Browser 10.53

Opera’s voice text-to-speech not working? The latest release of their web browser will not install voice support or fails to save the 10.5MB downloaded voice libraries. Well it appears that the enable voice-controlled browsing capability is no longer working. So if you require the voice function then you will have to resort to stepping back to it’s earlier predecessor Opera Version: 10.10 which works just fine.

The voice support is a plug-in that is provided by IBM voice libraries earlier versions can be viewed by typing “opera:about” in the address bar. IBM have apparently decided to drop support for this plug-in, which means these libraries have now been discontinued.

I doubt recent versions of Opera will include this unless it becomes something most users request. However I have found the Text-to-Speech functionality incredibly useful when browsing the web so please bring this function back.

Add comment June 14th, 2010

iTunes Dark Background

Since iTunes version 9 update some features were taken away. Personally I did prefer the dark background in version 8 compared to the now white background. The latest update to iTunes version 9.0.2 now allows you the option of switching the Grid View background colour back to dark again, shown as follows.

Instructions:
Edit > Preferences > General

2 comments November 4th, 2009

iTunes 9 Grid View

Wish grid view on albums was still there? One thing, which was bugging me a lot, was the loss of the icon size scroll bar in grid view. Luckily however they still have this feature built-in you just have to turn on the Show Header option.

Instructions:
View > Grid View > Show Header

Add comment November 3rd, 2009