This Week on the Web

New Opera Mini for Android.

It was release-o-rama here at Opera HQ this week, with Opera Mini 7 for Android making its debut on your smartphone, all new and improved, with

• unlimited Speed Dials
• super smooooth panning
and, my personal favorite,
• no prefilled "www." in the address bar.

We also welcomed Opera 11.62 to desktop, laptop and other non-handheld computers. This was a stability and security update, which only sounds a little ho-hum, until you find out it contained quite a few exciting little extras, such as being able to save files downloaded in a tiny pop-up and non-greedy multi-byte encodings.

Jameson Cameron: Pioneer and cool looking with hats.

Speaking of the perils of using jargon, here's a news item for anyone who has ever used the phrase "deep dive" when they wanted to take a closer look at something. Film director James Cameron's voyage of exploration this week to the Mariana Trench, an undersea valley in the western Pacific Ocean, took him 11 kilometers below the surface of the water. Apparently he saw lots of cool stuff, but whatever giant squids or monster jellyfish may have been glimpsed won't be shared with wider world until he releases a 3D documentary on the subject - which, if Cameron's past movies are any indication (Titanic, Avatar), will likely have a one-word title. Maybe just "Down"?

Meanwhile, over in Brazil, a school district in the northeastern part of the country made news for issuing uniforms with a tracking chip to some of its students. The purpose of the technology is to notify parents when their children skip school... no word, however, on whether there is a chip that says whether or not kids are paying attention in class.

Is there an app for that? It seems to have become the great question of our age - despite the fact that the answer is nearly always "yes." Case in point: an app that would allow humans and apes to chat. The apes involved in this project already know sign language, so we're not quite sure why we want them to start typing ... Could it be to finally test out the infinite monkey theorem? Only thing is, typing on a tablet seems much less likely to result in great literature or a play by Shakespeare than, say, a Twitter novel... Monkey tweet, monkey do!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

:)

Computer Software IXYS