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Category Archives: Opera Mini Tips and Tricks
Download Old Opera Mini 5 Beta Versions Here
The final version of Opera Mini 5 has been out for three months and for most people, myself included it works great. But on the Opera Mini User forum there is a recurrent theme of some users, particularly BlackBerry users, trying the released version and insisting that one of the Beta versions, usually Beta 2, was better.
At one time there was sticky post on the forum with links to the Opera Mini 5 Beta versions. The post is still there but the Beta links are gone. Forum moderator Mannes explained the removal as,
"Sorry, but I decided to remove betas from that post. Betas can always easily be downloaded other ways, and also, when a final version is released, we don't want anyone to be using betas anymore."
I can understand Opera wanting users to be on the latest version, but when that version doesn't work it's nice to have the option to roll back to an older one. It's not really that easy to find the Betas on the web or there wouldn't be so many users asking for them on the forums. So I've gathered up all the Opera Mini 5 versions I've been able to find and linked to them below.
These are all English language versions. Java phone users should try the JAD link first and if it doesn't work try the JAR. The ZIP files are for use with BlackBerry Desktop Manager.
Opera Mini 5 Beta 1
Unsigned: JAD, JAR
BlackBerry OS 4.2 ZIP
BlackBerry OS 4.3-4.6 ZIP
BlackBerry OS 4.7-5.0 ZIP
Opera Mini 5 Beta 2
Unsigned: JAD, JAR
Signed (multiple certificates) JAD JAR
BlackBerry OS 4.2 ZIP
BlackBerry OS 4.3-4.6 ZIP
BlackBerry OS 4.7-5.0 ZIP
Opera Mini 5.0 Final
Unsigned: JAD JAR
I don't have the other signed Java versions or OTA files for BlackBerrys yet. If and when I find them I will post them here. If any readers have copies of the missing versions and are willing to share them, please leave a comment.
Opera Mini iPhone Tips and Tricks
Opera Mini for the iPhone is a runaway success, it was the most free popular app in all 22 iTunes markets around the world for several days and over a million copies were downloaded the first day it was available.
For many of those million plus new users this is probably their first experience with Opera Mini. The browser is very fast and intuitive to use but it does work a bit differently than Safari.
Here are some fixes and answers for the most common issues and questions new users seem to be having with Opera Mini on the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Opera Link not synchronizing bookmarks: Only bookmarks in a special Opera Mini folder on the desktop are synchronized. The folder is green and has an Opera Link sync icon on it. It looks like this:
. If you have enabled Opera Link in Opera Mini and in desktop Opera and you don't see the Opera Mini folder, try saving a bookmark in Opera Mini and then loading a new page which will force a sync. Once you have the special folder, copy the bookmarks you want to see in Opera Mini into it.
Opera Mini only shows a blank white screen: This seems to be affecting mostly iPod Touch users. First try pressing the Home button and going back to the App Store and reinstaling Opera Mini. It that doesn't work see this thread on the Opera Mini User Forum for a possible, if rather geeky solution. I imagine that Opera will release an official fix for this issue soon.
How to get rid of the big header and menu bar at the top and bottom of the screen: Go into "Settings" (image above) and tap "Full Screen".
How to improve image quality: Go to Settings, tap "Image Quality" and choose "High"
How to add or change Speed Dials: Do a long press on the Speed Dial you want to change and Choose "Edit" or "Add".
How to save images on Web pages: Do a long press on the image and select "Save Image". Images are saved to the iPhone's "Photos" App.
How to copy text: Do a long press on the screen and choose "Select Text". Then tap and drag to highlight the text you want to copy. Lift your finger and then tap "Copy".
How to Paste Copied Text Into the Address Bar or a Field on a Web Page: Open the field you want to paste into for editing by tapping it. Then do a long press on the field and choose "Paste".
For more Opera Mini iPhone tips and tricks take a look at these posts on the Choose Opera blog:
Opera Mini 5 Settings, You think that is real text you are looking at?
How to import your bookmarks to Opera, Opera Mini Web page layouts on iProducts
Problems With Bookmarklets in Opera Mini 5 Beta 2
Update: These issues were fixed in Opera Mini 5 Final
The latest beta of Opera Mini 5 is my new browser of choice. On my Nokia N95-3 it's fast and stable and offers great rendering and a best in class feature set including tabbed browsing, bookmark synchronization and a choice of desktop or fit to width formatting.
But I'm also a big user of bookmarklets, snippets of JavaScript stored in a browser bookmark. Bookmarklets provide all sorts productivity enhancing features. I use them to post the current page to Delicious.com, get a Google translation of pages in languages I can't read, add a feed to Bloglines, highlight all the links on a page with a yellow background and a lot more. I've created a page at o.yeswap.com with over 50 tested in Opera Mini bookmarklets that I've written, found on the web or that were submitted by WapReview readers.
When I upgraded to Opera Mini 5 Beta 2, I enabled Opera Link to bring in all the bookmarks and bookmarklets that I'd been using in Opera Mini 4.2. I soon discovered that several of my bookmarklets no longer worked in Beta 2. It wasn't hard to see what was happening. Opera Mini was corrupting the addresses of my bookmarklets.
Users on the Opera Mini forum have reported numerous issues with bookmarks and bookmarklets in Beta 2.
I've reproduced two of the issues, both of which I've found workarounds for.
Issue 1. Bookmarklets in Speed Dials generally don't work. If a bookmarklet in a Speed Dial loads a web page, the stored bookmarklet address gets changed to the address of the page loaded. The screenshots show what happens. The top two show the "Add to Delicious" bookmarket as it was keyed. The bottom two show what it looks like after it's saved and Opera Mini corrupts it.
Issue 2. If an existing bookmarket is edited in any way, even just changing its title or moving it to a different folder "http://" gets prepended to the JavaScript URI making it invalid. This seems to happen regardless of whether you edit the bookmarklet in Opera Mini 5 or edit on the desktop and let Opera Link synchronize the changes to Opera Mini.
You can still use bookmarklets in Opera Mini 5 Beta 2, but you need to be very careful how you create and edit them. I recommend:
Don't use bookmarklets in Speed Dials. Put all your bookmarklets in the Bookmarklets folder instead. It's annoying to give up the convenience of two keypress access to your favorite bookmarklets. To ease the pain, start the titles of your most used Speed Dial bookmarklets with an underscore when you recreate in Opera Mini's bookmarks folder. That way they will sort at the top of the bookmarks list and you can get to them with only a few more clicks than if they were Speed Dials by using the # + 5 shortcut to Bookmarks.
Don't edit bookmarklets after initially saving them. It's OK to edit the title or bookmarklet address when first adding it but editing a bookmarklet after it has been saved will corrupt it.
If all this sounds like more trouble than it's worth you can always stick with Opera Mini 4.2 until the next Opera Mini release. Opera Mini 5 is a Beta and bugs are to be expected. The bookmarklet bugs have been reported and I expect the Opera development team to fix them them before the final Opera Mini 5 release. Also Opera Mobile 10 seems to be free of the bookmarklet corruption bug providing a good alternative on supported phones.
Related Posts:
Updated Opera Mini Bookmarklets Page
Bookmarklets for Opera Mini
Opera Mini 5 Beta – First Impressions
View PDFs in Opera Mini, Easy Peasy!
Pdf documents continue to be a pain in the butt for mobile web users. Most mobile browsers can't open them and downloading a PDF for viewing with a dedicated reader app is time consuming and only possible on fairly advanced handsets.
A month ago I wrote about a way to view PDFs in Opera Mini by pasting the PDF's URL into an online PDF to HTML converter form. That works but requires quite a few steps to accomplish and isn't particularly user friendly.
A WapReview reader named Joel has discovered a new much easier way to view PDFs on any phone that can run Opera Mini. It's a bookmarklet that rewrites links to PDFs on a Web page so that they point to the online PDF to image converter at view.samurajdata.se. Only links to PDFs get re-written after running the bookmarklet, the page still looks and works normally except that PDFs now actually display in th browser when the link to one is clicked.
Here's how to get and use Joel's bookmarklet in Opera Mini.
- Visit o.yeswap.com/#Tools using Opera Mini
- Click one on the first link in the Tools section labeled "View PDFs".
- When the page reloads, press # then 7 in Opera Mini (# then 5 in Opera Mini 5) to bookmark the page.
- Edit the bookmark URL by removing "http://o.yeswap.com/?" from the beginning. The edited bookmarklet URL should start with "javascript:var%20link".
To use the bookmarklet:
- Visit a page that has links to PDFs. This can be a Google Search result page or any other page with PDF links.
- Immediately after the page loads go toopera Mini's Bookmark page and click the "View PDFs" bookmark. The current page will reload
- Clicking links to PDFs now opens them in the view.samurajdata.se online PDF viewer. Hint, use Opera Mini's "Desktop View" which lets you scroll around and zoom into the document image as needed.
I've only tested the bookmarklet in Opera Mini, but it should also work with iPhones, the S60 5th edition browser and recent versions of Mobile Internet Explorer, Palm Blazer or Opera Mobile. In Opera Mobile you need to turn off the option to open bookmarks in a new window.
Incidentally the free Java browser UCWEB has built-in PDF "preview" capabilities which should make it an even easier way to view PDFs. However the UCWEB PDF service seems to be down at the moment. I tried using it to open three random PDFs that I found using Google ( Form 11-C, Ticket.pdf and Ward_Meehan.pdf ) and got an error message or a blank page with all three in UCWEB. The same files opened almost instantly with Joel's bookmarklet.
