Widget Round-Up
Sunday, 21. January 2007, 20:52:59
Well, I said I'd like to be a judge/reviewer for this contest, so I certainly can't back out now. I spent some time playing around with each of the qualifying widgets and here is what I thought.
In random order:
Multi Game
I know I'm guilty of this too (my Roshambo widget) but with a simple game like tic tac toe, you should at least be able to play by yourself against the computer. Programming an AI is no small task though. I remember making my own tic tac toe game in QBasic years ago and perfecting the computer so it could never be beaten took me a month or two of on and off tweaking!
As it happens, I wasn't able to wake anyone up to play the games, so I'll comment on the interface, at least. I like it. The gradients scream slick Web 2.0 (which is is!) and the image fonts are neutral and undemanding. My only big problem was with the Error popup which was eye-assaulting yellow without any padding. Really, it should be in the same style as the rest of the system.
Other little problems consisted of a duplicated "Joined" message when I initially logged in, plus I'd like to see some hand-made buttons rather than using the Opera default. The default buttons depend on the skin, and it's quite possible the user's selection will completely clash with the widget.
Also, while it's nice that there is a "TIP" on the bottom of each of the Challenges dialogues, which tells you to press the same button up to to close the window... The best thing to do in this case would be to put an actual close button on each of these windows, while still allowing pressing the top buttons to close. I tend to believe that if you find yourself tempted to "explain" your interface to users (other than in the Instructions), then you are probably overcomplicating things.
Anyway. I downloaded the widget a second time and played some tic tac toe against myself. I was surprised the game area was just a green wash. Where did the lovely gradients go? Also, when I played, it kept saying the X player won, when really the O player did. Then when I tired of playing, I found there was no obvious way to go back to the Chat screen and look for new challengers. After playing a few games, I came to think that this widget could be a lot smaller, and still retain decent room for the chat screen.
In conclusion, great work on the system, but still needs polishing.
Repton Fusion
What can I say? As someone who's played similar original games for the C64, (there must have been dozens on this theme) I immediately took to this game. Unfortunately, because I'd played these games on the C64, I was troubled by the small viewing area of the playfield, and the slowness as a result of pushing the canvas element beyond it's normal limits.
As for the playfield, I'm pretty sure the versions I originally played were not Repton Fusion, (I'm almost certain it was Boulder Dash), so I may just be used to a larger area than originally shown in RF.
Other than that, I was amazed by the stability of the widget. Because of the slowness, I kept expecting my quick keypresses, turns and rock pushing to generate some kind of play error, but nothing of the sort ever occurred.
There is a lot I could say about this game, but suffice it to say that while it's almost a shoo-in to win this contest, johnny should be aware that it may be seconded merely because he tried to bite off more than he could chew. Obviously, the current state of the canvas processing engine on any browser platform struggles to keep up with this game. But good luck regardless!
PaxKel Radio
First off, I don't normally listen to radio streams of any kind, so I am biased. Sorry, but that's the way I am
I <3 my mp3 collection. So here are some comments on the interface.
In general, I like it since it's clean and nicely saturated with gradients. At least the top part! The bottom part in album-cover mode definitely needs a few tweaks. First, it's noticably off-center, sitting too far to the right. Plus the blue background doesn't reach all the way to the bottom border, leaving a row or two of transparent pixels. The 2px inset border itself looks a little cheap, and reminds me of how the web looked in 1998.
Okay, so that sounds a little harsh, and the truth is, I wouldn't be so hard on the bottom section except that the top bar looks so damn fine! It would only take a little bit of work to make this widget slick all over. Why can't you use the background from the Options menu for the album cover mode at least?
I liked how easy it was to access the stream from this widget however, IMHO, the "Listen Now!" link is superfluous. Users should be able to click the Play button in the top bar and be sent to the stream. As it is, the stop and play buttons being used for expanding and collapsing the widget is definitely user-unfriendly. Users are used to certain labels on buttons to perform the same action wherever they appear; changing the function of these buttons is confusing at best and off-putting at worst.
A Play button should always start playback. A Stop button should always stop playback. Instead of using these buttons to open and close the album-cover dialogue, you should use the already tried and true window Minimize and Close buttons used in virtually all operating systems. Users will instantly understand these buttons, rather than needing to experiment, or read the instructions.
Since the stream is played by a program outside the widget, the Stop button shouldn't be included at all, but I still think the Play button should link to the stream.
Finally, I don't understand why the fullsize album cover needs to load in a popup browser window. The "larger size" album covers still aren't as wide as the widget itself, they would be more conveniently loaded in the widget itself, no? If users wanted to save this image, link the large image to a normal web image.
In conclusion, this is one widget that does what it says on the tin and doesn't try to do anything gimmicky to wow users. Too often I've tried to play streams from websites, and found that half don't work are are incompatible with my preferred player (foobar2000), and the other half are an unbearable 24kbps or lower! Ugh! Plus PaxKel plays a good mix, from Sammy Davis Jr. singing The Candyman, to Yes' Owner of a Lonely Heart
Great work! Needs just a bit more design lovin', but still, great work! I left this widget playing while I played with the others
Time and Date
Okay, I'm olde skool. I like paper calendars. I like the Windows clock. I like keeping things simple. So I'll say right away that I'd probably never think of using this widget. In fact, the only good thing I have to say about this widget is the amazing skin, plus the fact that it is dynamically changable.
Not many widgets allow that, but obviously a lot of patience and work was put into the display styles of this widget. It's a little on the large side (way too much padding/margin) but everything flows perfectly. Aside from execution speed of the animations, there are no rough spots here! It easily ranks among the best looking widgets at widgets.opera.com. My only two beefs with the actual design is, once again, to use hand rolled buttons rather than depending on the Opera default. It takes some extra work, but makes a huge difference. And second, for heaven sakes, if you're going to use the Opera supplied close button, then use the associated Settings button too. In fact all of the Exit/Hide/About and Settings buttons should be along the top of the widget; and the "X" Close button should actually close the widget, not just minimize it. Keep some consistancy among widgets
I like the Import and export tool, but I would suggest base64 encoding the output. No need to confuse users with javascript syntax they may worry about pasting in wrong after an update.
There's not much else to say about this widget. It looks great, but it's just not my bag, baby Sorry.
Video Manager
As the creator of the ImageGREP widget, I welcomed this video-related companion widget. Unfortunately, while I wanted to love this widget, it didn't seem to work for me; I downloaded version 1.3b. I could search for videos just fine, but trying to load them externally, or inside the widget itself failed, no matter what I tried. My plugins were enabled, but it just kept opening blank pages.
Besides that, when I set the widget to play the videos internally, it created a second "green-arrow" tab along the bottom, but switching back to loading externally didn't remove it. Only closing and reopening the bottom area fixed this.
Other problems I have with this widget:
I'd like an option to float the video thumbnails to the right, make them 1/4 the size they are now, and only show the title of each video. On clicking the title, the entry would expand and show the description/rating/upload date etc. This would make video searching much more efficient IMHO.
In conclusion, impressive, but at the same time still riddled with easily fixable distractions that keep a good widget from becoming great.
TankWar Online
In so many words: simple but it works! I was initially disappointed in the GUI quality of this widget, but when you consider that even the original Scorched Earth wasn't much more sophisticated, it's easy to get past first impressions. When I played Scorched Earth, it was entirely a type-in game. You typed in the weapon, typed in the angle, then typed in the power. So I was pleasantly surprised by the mouse power/direction system. It took a few shots to get used to, but after a while I got the hang of it.
However, more than once I was tripped up by the airspeed, which occasionally appears underneath the "Player 1"/"Player 2" dialogue and barely visible.
Anyway, while I happily played a few two player games against myself, I began to miss a few options I remember from the first Scorched Earth. First was the ability to customize the random land generator, from completely flat, to huge hills. In comparison, the land generator for TankWar appears to be nothing more than a zigzag line pattern. I was expecting plateaus, smooth-sloping valleys and such, more like a real land cross-section.
Another thing I missed was the ability to move. In the Scorced Earth I played, one of your options was moving, which worked almost like firing a weapon, you chose a direction and a power and your tank would get "thrown" along the ground a certain distance.
And finally, I missed the oh-so-cheesy yellow and orange explosion circles which would appear before the dirt disappeared And related that that, I kind of wish the dirt behaved the same too, where unconnected particles would fall and create piles, rather than precarious overhangs. It added a sense of strategy since high falls could also damage a player, and shooting the ground out from under them could be just a deadly as landing one right on the turret.
Oh, that reminds me! You have to add firing and hit quotes! So much fun I had playing the original, was when you fired and your little tank operator would yell taunts before the projectile launched, like "Fire in the hole!" or "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!". Plus when players got hit, they'd also say silly things, like "Ouch!!!" or "I'm burning! I'm burning!"
These messages appeared as a line or two of text above the associated tank before firing and after being hit. Man, those were good times...
Once again, I'm biased since I played the original, and IMHO, it's missing too many features of that original version for me to go crazy over this one. Although the online play feature is an impressive accomplishment for any widget!
My Predictions
So, that's all six widgets. If I had to guess the vote tally order for the contest I'd put them in the following order:
However, due to the fact that it was the only widget I felt like keeping around after finishing testing it, and plus that it's the most conservative user of screen real estate out of all six widgets... For me personally, I have to give the edge to the PaxKel Radio widget. Sorry johnnysaucepn and zomg.
Good luck skid94, and everyone else! If only there were enough Wii's for everyone!
In random order:
Multi Game
I know I'm guilty of this too (my Roshambo widget) but with a simple game like tic tac toe, you should at least be able to play by yourself against the computer. Programming an AI is no small task though. I remember making my own tic tac toe game in QBasic years ago and perfecting the computer so it could never be beaten took me a month or two of on and off tweaking!
As it happens, I wasn't able to wake anyone up to play the games, so I'll comment on the interface, at least. I like it. The gradients scream slick Web 2.0 (which is is!) and the image fonts are neutral and undemanding. My only big problem was with the Error popup which was eye-assaulting yellow without any padding. Really, it should be in the same style as the rest of the system.
Other little problems consisted of a duplicated "Joined" message when I initially logged in, plus I'd like to see some hand-made buttons rather than using the Opera default. The default buttons depend on the skin, and it's quite possible the user's selection will completely clash with the widget.
Also, while it's nice that there is a "TIP" on the bottom of each of the Challenges dialogues, which tells you to press the same button up to to close the window... The best thing to do in this case would be to put an actual close button on each of these windows, while still allowing pressing the top buttons to close. I tend to believe that if you find yourself tempted to "explain" your interface to users (other than in the Instructions), then you are probably overcomplicating things.
Anyway. I downloaded the widget a second time and played some tic tac toe against myself. I was surprised the game area was just a green wash. Where did the lovely gradients go? Also, when I played, it kept saying the X player won, when really the O player did. Then when I tired of playing, I found there was no obvious way to go back to the Chat screen and look for new challengers. After playing a few games, I came to think that this widget could be a lot smaller, and still retain decent room for the chat screen.
In conclusion, great work on the system, but still needs polishing.
Repton Fusion
What can I say? As someone who's played similar original games for the C64, (there must have been dozens on this theme) I immediately took to this game. Unfortunately, because I'd played these games on the C64, I was troubled by the small viewing area of the playfield, and the slowness as a result of pushing the canvas element beyond it's normal limits.
As for the playfield, I'm pretty sure the versions I originally played were not Repton Fusion, (I'm almost certain it was Boulder Dash), so I may just be used to a larger area than originally shown in RF.
Other than that, I was amazed by the stability of the widget. Because of the slowness, I kept expecting my quick keypresses, turns and rock pushing to generate some kind of play error, but nothing of the sort ever occurred.
There is a lot I could say about this game, but suffice it to say that while it's almost a shoo-in to win this contest, johnny should be aware that it may be seconded merely because he tried to bite off more than he could chew. Obviously, the current state of the canvas processing engine on any browser platform struggles to keep up with this game. But good luck regardless!
PaxKel Radio
First off, I don't normally listen to radio streams of any kind, so I am biased. Sorry, but that's the way I am
I <3 my mp3 collection. So here are some comments on the interface.In general, I like it since it's clean and nicely saturated with gradients. At least the top part! The bottom part in album-cover mode definitely needs a few tweaks. First, it's noticably off-center, sitting too far to the right. Plus the blue background doesn't reach all the way to the bottom border, leaving a row or two of transparent pixels. The 2px inset border itself looks a little cheap, and reminds me of how the web looked in 1998.
Okay, so that sounds a little harsh, and the truth is, I wouldn't be so hard on the bottom section except that the top bar looks so damn fine! It would only take a little bit of work to make this widget slick all over. Why can't you use the background from the Options menu for the album cover mode at least?
I liked how easy it was to access the stream from this widget however, IMHO, the "Listen Now!" link is superfluous. Users should be able to click the Play button in the top bar and be sent to the stream. As it is, the stop and play buttons being used for expanding and collapsing the widget is definitely user-unfriendly. Users are used to certain labels on buttons to perform the same action wherever they appear; changing the function of these buttons is confusing at best and off-putting at worst.
A Play button should always start playback. A Stop button should always stop playback. Instead of using these buttons to open and close the album-cover dialogue, you should use the already tried and true window Minimize and Close buttons used in virtually all operating systems. Users will instantly understand these buttons, rather than needing to experiment, or read the instructions.
Since the stream is played by a program outside the widget, the Stop button shouldn't be included at all, but I still think the Play button should link to the stream.
Finally, I don't understand why the fullsize album cover needs to load in a popup browser window. The "larger size" album covers still aren't as wide as the widget itself, they would be more conveniently loaded in the widget itself, no? If users wanted to save this image, link the large image to a normal web image.
In conclusion, this is one widget that does what it says on the tin and doesn't try to do anything gimmicky to wow users. Too often I've tried to play streams from websites, and found that half don't work are are incompatible with my preferred player (foobar2000), and the other half are an unbearable 24kbps or lower! Ugh! Plus PaxKel plays a good mix, from Sammy Davis Jr. singing The Candyman, to Yes' Owner of a Lonely Heart
Great work! Needs just a bit more design lovin', but still, great work! I left this widget playing while I played with the others
Time and Date
Okay, I'm olde skool. I like paper calendars. I like the Windows clock. I like keeping things simple. So I'll say right away that I'd probably never think of using this widget. In fact, the only good thing I have to say about this widget is the amazing skin, plus the fact that it is dynamically changable.
Not many widgets allow that, but obviously a lot of patience and work was put into the display styles of this widget. It's a little on the large side (way too much padding/margin) but everything flows perfectly. Aside from execution speed of the animations, there are no rough spots here! It easily ranks among the best looking widgets at widgets.opera.com. My only two beefs with the actual design is, once again, to use hand rolled buttons rather than depending on the Opera default. It takes some extra work, but makes a huge difference. And second, for heaven sakes, if you're going to use the Opera supplied close button, then use the associated Settings button too. In fact all of the Exit/Hide/About and Settings buttons should be along the top of the widget; and the "X" Close button should actually close the widget, not just minimize it. Keep some consistancy among widgets
I like the Import and export tool, but I would suggest base64 encoding the output. No need to confuse users with javascript syntax they may worry about pasting in wrong after an update.
There's not much else to say about this widget. It looks great, but it's just not my bag, baby
Sorry.Video Manager
As the creator of the ImageGREP widget, I welcomed this video-related companion widget. Unfortunately, while I wanted to love this widget, it didn't seem to work for me; I downloaded version 1.3b. I could search for videos just fine, but trying to load them externally, or inside the widget itself failed, no matter what I tried. My plugins were enabled, but it just kept opening blank pages.
Besides that, when I set the widget to play the videos internally, it created a second "green-arrow" tab along the bottom, but switching back to loading externally didn't remove it. Only closing and reopening the bottom area fixed this.
Other problems I have with this widget:
- It doesn't give any indication as to its purpose on initial load, just showing a blank search box, settings and close buttons. At least include the title of the widget, in case other widget authors create widgets with similar interfaces and users download both.
- The title of the widget "Video Manager" seems misleading to me. Before I read the description, I thought it was something designed to index your own local video collection, but I knew widgets don't have access the the file system. IMHO, a title like "Video Search" or "MetaTube" (just checked and that's taken
And here I thought I had a bonanza!) would give a more accurate first impression as to what this widget does.
- When the results come up, they aren't very well delimited. They almost run into each other, and after scrolling some, one can almost become confused as to which title belongs to which video, the upper one, or the bottom one? You need some dividers here, or at least some "zebra" backgrounds.
- When I hit the Check for Updates button, nothing happens. I know I am using the latest version atm, but it should at least tell me that I am using the latest version instead of keeping silent and making me wonder if it's broken.
I'd like an option to float the video thumbnails to the right, make them 1/4 the size they are now, and only show the title of each video. On clicking the title, the entry would expand and show the description/rating/upload date etc. This would make video searching much more efficient IMHO.
In conclusion, impressive, but at the same time still riddled with easily fixable distractions that keep a good widget from becoming great.
TankWar Online
In so many words: simple but it works! I was initially disappointed in the GUI quality of this widget, but when you consider that even the original Scorched Earth wasn't much more sophisticated, it's easy to get past first impressions. When I played Scorched Earth, it was entirely a type-in game. You typed in the weapon, typed in the angle, then typed in the power. So I was pleasantly surprised by the mouse power/direction system. It took a few shots to get used to, but after a while I got the hang of it.
However, more than once I was tripped up by the airspeed, which occasionally appears underneath the "Player 1"/"Player 2" dialogue and barely visible.
Anyway, while I happily played a few two player games against myself, I began to miss a few options I remember from the first Scorched Earth. First was the ability to customize the random land generator, from completely flat, to huge hills. In comparison, the land generator for TankWar appears to be nothing more than a zigzag line pattern. I was expecting plateaus, smooth-sloping valleys and such, more like a real land cross-section.
Another thing I missed was the ability to move. In the Scorced Earth I played, one of your options was moving, which worked almost like firing a weapon, you chose a direction and a power and your tank would get "thrown" along the ground a certain distance.
And finally, I missed the oh-so-cheesy yellow and orange explosion circles which would appear before the dirt disappeared
And related that that, I kind of wish the dirt behaved the same too, where unconnected particles would fall and create piles, rather than precarious overhangs. It added a sense of strategy since high falls could also damage a player, and shooting the ground out from under them could be just a deadly as landing one right on the turret.Oh, that reminds me! You have to add firing and hit quotes! So much fun I had playing the original, was when you fired and your little tank operator would yell taunts before the projectile launched, like "Fire in the hole!" or "I love the smell of napalm in the morning!". Plus when players got hit, they'd also say silly things, like "Ouch!!!" or "I'm burning! I'm burning!"
These messages appeared as a line or two of text above the associated tank before firing and after being hit. Man, those were good times...Once again, I'm biased since I played the original, and IMHO, it's missing too many features of that original version for me to go crazy over this one. Although the online play feature is an impressive accomplishment for any widget!
My Predictions
So, that's all six widgets. If I had to guess the vote tally order for the contest I'd put them in the following order:
- Repton Fusion
- TankWar Online
- PaxKel Radio
- Video Manager
- Multi Game
- Time and Date
However, due to the fact that it was the only widget I felt like keeping around after finishing testing it, and plus that it's the most conservative user of screen real estate out of all six widgets... For me personally, I have to give the edge to the PaxKel Radio widget. Sorry johnnysaucepn and zomg.
Good luck skid94, and everyone else! If only there were enough Wii's for everyone!
WIDGETIZE