Two things hap­pened last week: news leaked that Opera are plan­ning to launch a new brows­er based on WebKit; and the new dis­cus­sion tool, Branch, came out of pri­vate beta. As an exper­i­ment, I want to talk about the first on the sec­ond, so I invite you to read and par­tic­i­pate in my branch Opera Ice: New brows­er for Android and iPhone com­ing Feb­rua….

Inspired by Anna Deben­ham’s report on the Nin­ten­do DSi brows­er, I thought I’d write a short review of the brows­er on my Kobo Touch eRead­er. The brows­er is hid­den away under Set­tings > Extras, below a big bold note that says it’s not offi­cial­ly sup­port­ed; but as it’s there, let’s review it.

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As I’m sure you’re aware, Opera recent­ly released a pre­view build of their brows­er Mobile Emu­la­tor which is notable large­ly because they’ve aliased a group of -webkit- pre­fixed prop­er­ties, effec­tive­ly sup­port­ing anoth­er ven­dors sup­pos­ed­ly pro­pri­etary code in their own.

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I just watched a great doc­u­men­tary called The Inven­tion of Dr. Naka­mats*, and loved the style of the titles and cred­its (Vimeo video) by The Ronin. I thought I’d have a go at doing them in CSS, and you can see my first attempt here:

Dr. Naka­mats in CSS3.

It uses 3D Trans­for­ma­tions so needs to be viewed in Safari for the full effect, but degrades quite grace­ful­ly. I had a go at adding some ani­ma­tions to it but it did­n’t feel right, so I’ve left that out for now. That aside, I’m hap­py with the way it looks and it was real­ly easy to make. CSS has come a long way.

* If you’re in the UK you can cur­rent­ly watch this on 4OD.

I recent­ly became the own­er of an Android phone* and found that, despite it being list­ed as a fea­ture of the brows­er, the HTML5 video ele­ment did­n’t work for almost all of the exam­ples I tried. I’ve just done some exper­i­men­ta­tion with this and think I’ve found a solu­tion, so this post is offered in the hope that it helps any­one who may be tear­ing their hair out over the same problem.

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Site­point’s Web Design blog fea­tured an arti­cle this week called Cre­ate A Stu­dio Style Back­drop In Pho­to­shop, which pro­vides instruc­tions for mak­ing a glossy, reflec­tive sur­face effect, sim­i­lar to what you often see in adverts.

As the title makes clear, the tuto­r­i­al is for cre­at­ing the effect in Pho­to­shop — but real­ly, the same effect is fair­ly eas­i­ly achiev­able with some bleed­ing-edge CSS. That said, it won’t work in every brows­er, so cur­rent­ly it’s just a proof-of-con­cept piece.

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