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Ask your questions to the people behind Opera Widgets on mobile phones
A few months ago Opera announced that the upcoming edition of Opera Mobile, based on the Opera 9 browser, will support Opera Widgets.
These Opera Widgets are small web applications that run outside of the browser and will be instantly accessible on the phone without having to launch the Web browser.
Opera Widgets are based on the same technologies used to create webpages – HTML, CSS, SVG, JavaScript (and AJAX) – so you could easily create a weather, traffic, news or email widget that gets its data by using AJAX, for example. No longer do you need to program your mobile applications in JME, etc – now, it’s as simple as developing webpage.
Opera Widgets is certainly an exciting technology platform for developers to build applications for mobile phones. There are far more developers that are able to program using web technologies than any other development technology for mobile. In addition, this will allow for user-generated mobile widgets to be easily developed and deployed.
I thought it would be beneficial for you guys and gals to get more information about widgets on mobile phones. I’ve invited a couple of Product Managers at Opera Software working on the mobile side to answer the questions you may have on mobile widgets.
Post your questions about Opera Widgets support on mobile phones to the comments. I’ll post the answers here on Opera Watch in the coming weeks.
Got any questions about Opera Widgets on mobile phones? Ask.
Silverlight will work with Opera
Microsoft Silverlight, which is a cross-browser plug-in for creating rich interactive applications, is getting lots of buzz these days.
I’ve seen many complaints on blogs and forums about Silverlight not working in Opera. I will have a bit more information about this later, but for now I can just say that Silverlight will work in Opera.
More later.
Universities and others benefit from Opera's paid support
Last week I blogged about whether people still use Opera’s paid support for the desktop browser when there’s so much free help available in the Opera Forums.
Ben Buchanan, an Opera user, mentioned (in the comments) his experience on getting his university to install Opera on their computers in the student lab. “To get a new bit of software installed in a large scale computing environment, you have to prove that it can and will be supported.”
Here’s what Ben wrote (edited for clarity):
I used to work at a university and was successful in getting Opera installed in all the student computer lab machines (and made available to staff on request). To get a new piece of software installed in a large scale computing environment you have to prove that it can and will be supported.
At the time, Opera was free for universities but not the world; so there was a “priority support” deal that universities could sign up to. That, plus the bailout option of being able to buy support actually made the product more attractive to the execs making the decisions. Essentially, large organizations actually want to be able to pay for support – since they don’t want to rely on “goodwill” support like forums.
It’s a reasonable concern – the tech support crew doesn’t want to be lumped with an unsupported product and hundreds of students asking for help. They’ve got to be able to get support quickly if they need it.
The other big thing was Opera moving to an MSI installer – man did the techs grumble about the previous non-MSI version. Again, quite a reasonable issue, since MSI installers were infinitely easier for them to roll out.
Opera does offer paid support, which should, in theory, make it more attractive for large organizations to install rather than Firefox (which doesn’t offer any paid support).
Are you a student in school? Have you tried getting Opera installed on your school’s computers? Help others realize the Opera-browsing experience too!
Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese versions of Opera's site released
Opera launched two more localized versions of www.opera.com in Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. These sites will enable users from their respective regions to view Opera’s pages in their native language.
China continues to be a key market for Opera with 137 million Internet users, making it the world’s second largest market behind the US.
In addition to Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, Opera also has localized versions in Russian, Korean, Polish, and Japanese. Opera is currently working on localizing its website in other key markets.
I’d like to give a plug to a Chinese Opera blog by an Opera user in China.
Note: I’ve updated this post with a reference to Traditional Chinese, rather than Taiwanese.
Opera Watch 