Opera Unite: the good, the bad and the ugly

So I tried out Opera Unite, and here are my first impressions:

Good:

• The Opera Unite proxy that allows you to serve even behind a firewall, very nifty. Even experienced SysAdmin's have a hard time with this in some cases. The Opera Unite solution Just Works™.
• Works fine cross-browser (on the client side)

Bad:

• No option to use Opera Unite with your own domain or proxy (very proprietary to me)
• No way to backup/sync collection of installed services.
• No real open social network framework features included, as I had hoped...
• PHP? Python? Java?

Ugly:

• The Opera Unite server simply is terminated when you close Opera, without warning! FAIL!
• No auto-update functionality for installed services
• Force-reinstall to reactivate a deleted service, huh?

So basically all you get is a very fancy proxy for hosting pages with server-side JavaScript, all baked into a proprietary browser, accessible from a proprietary domain...

Good idea for a Firefox Extension though... ;-) Oh wait! That allready exists (well except for the proxy part anyway)!

Status update

Hey folks, it's been a while since I posted. Just for my future referral (I don't keep a diary), and the interest of anyone that cares, I thought I'd sum up what I've been up to lately.

In December or so I decided I got fed up with Brazil (more about that in future posts) and started planning my trip back to Holland. So I quit my job in February and left for Holland end of march. Thanks to the fact that I actively started looking for a job in the Netherlands as early as January it didn't take me long to get a new job in the Netherlands. So in April I started my new job as web developer at Q-pon.

So, as for Vulpes, that project is currently on hold due to lack of free time on my part. If anyone wishes to continue development on Vulpes, let me know! LibFox, on the other hand, is now being developed on in an internal branch at Q-pon. Though I still need to ask my boss for permission to distribute the changes. There are some really neat new features in there though.

I also finally got myself a proper phone, a T-Mobile G1. :-) It's thanks to this phone that I finally have time to write on my blog again. (This post was written on my G1 in the train to work.)

So that's it for now. I will be following up soon with some more stuff I have been wanting to write down for a while now. Stay tuned.