Opera Dragonfly, One (and a bit) week in

Opera Dragonfly is just over a week old, and I think we can say the early signs are we had a successful launch. It was ready and launched on time, except some gremlins in the server which took a few minutes to sync the development version of the web site with the live site. We got a lot of coverage both in the media and on blogs. We made TechCrunch (and Washington Post), Wired, Digital Web and Ajaxian among others.

I've been trawling the Web for feedback, as part of our team meeting today, to discuss the Beta 1 roadmap. In general the feedback has been positive and understanding that the release was a first alpha. Much of the feedback for feature requests were already on our current roadmap, so I'm hopeful that by the time we hit final, we will have a very useful tool for Web developers. Speed has been a concern, but Opera Dragonfly isn't fully optimised yet, and improvements in Scope, which may come for Beta 1, should help. Currently JSON is not fully supported for everything in Scope, and we find that JSON is much faster currently than XML for communicating between Opera Dragonfly and Scope.

While responding to feedback in the Opera Dragonfly forums, I noticed my first (external) patch. Azamadt Smaguloff (from Kazakhstan) posted a patch on the forums to enable autocomplete in the Command Line. I've not had time to check how this works yet, but this feature is something I've noticed a few people have requested. I think it is fantastic the developers are already interested enough to add to Opera Dragonfly themselves. We don't current take in external check-ins into the official branch, but that doesn't mean we never will.

Things are currently on track for our second alpha, which should (all going well) include inline editing, infrastructure for localisation and bug fixes. Once editing works, that should make the CSS Inspector much more useful for designers.