Donna Fraser | Web Developer

Opera Web Browser 10.53

Donna Fraser — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:16:46 +0000

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.

iTunes Dark Background

Donna Fraser — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:05:56 +0000

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

iTunes 9 Grid View

Donna Fraser — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:35:07 +0000

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