Following on our Opera Mini 5 beta launch, we've just announced the release of another mobile browser — this time it's Opera Mobile 10 beta for Symbian. While they both feature a similar redesigned UI, Opera Mobile 10 makes the most of your smartphone's capabilities, featuring a full JavaScript and layout engine.
Naturally there are many improvements for mobile surfers to enjoy, but what will be of particular interest to developers are the enhancements to Presto, our rendering engine. Not only is it much faster than the previous incarnation of Opera Mobile, but you may also be impressed at its standards support. You can read more about Opera Mobile 10 from a developer's perspective over at dev.opera.
In addition there is one more feature aimed at developers that we're particularly proud of and that is the ability to remotely debug a web page on your mobile phone using Opera Dragonfly on your desktop. Put more simply, as you edit the web page's code on your desktop, its display is dynamically updated on your mobile phone. The process is as follows:
(Desktop): Make a note of your local IP address and fire up Dragonfly.
(Desktop): Enable remote debug in Settings and click Apply then OK in the pop-up dialog box.
(Mobile): Open opera:debug, enter your desktop's IP address and click Connect then OK in the pop-up dialog box.
(Desktop): Click OK in the pop-up dialog box to download the new version of Dragonfly, then click OK.
(Mobile): Click Connect again in opera:debug, then click OK in the pop-up dialog box.
(Mobile): Open the web page you want to debug, ideally in a new tab.
(Desktop): Select the site to debug in Dragonfly and edit the HTML and CSS to your heart's content.
We've made a short video to show remote debugging in action with captions for people that suffer from deafness/limited hearing (or if you just want to watch it without disturbing those around you). Furthermore, the captions are also available in English, Japanese and Russian.
I had the pleasure of speaking to a really savvy crowd at Surrey University last night on "Tomorrow's web standards today". It was a fun session with lots of really good questions at the end - just the way I like it.
Below are my slides written in HTML. They're best viewed in Opera on full screen (View > Full screen) but of course work in any browser.Demos for <video>, <canvas>, SVG, web forms, widgets and media queries are all either linked from the presentation or bundled together in the download.
I presented at Over the Air last week, a two day hack focusing on widgets and the mobile web. It was a great end to an already busy stretch of conferences with a day of presentations followed by an all night hack and presentations the next day.
It was all about widgets and a heavy emphasis on web standards and the buzz was around who could build the best widget in a number of categories ranging from best Doctor Who hack to location aware hack. You can check out the competition winners on the Over the Air blog.
It was good to be able to show the potential of widgets for all users and just how easy Opera widgets are to build with plain old HTML, CSS and XML - no added programing languages needed. I demoed how to build, test and deploy a widget using our widget emulator and Opera Dragonfly for remote debugging.
Below is the presentation which is also available in the following formats:
We’ve just released Opera Mini 5 beta, which sports a revamped UI with tabs, Speed Dial, and a password manager. If you have a phone that supports Java, you’ll most likely be able to run this beta — note that the UI is slightly different depending on whether you have a touchscreen or keypad phone.
If you don’t have a Java-enabled phone at your disposal, you can try running Opera Mini 5 beta in the MicroEmulator on your desktop.
As usual, we’ve published a Dev.Opera article to go with this release, covering Opera Mini 5 beta’s new features and standards support, as well as some tips for mobile optimization.
Another standard that Opera is involved with is the Widgets specification. Widgets are standalone applications that are made with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. They are zipped up with an XML configuration file that describes their size on the screen, or whether they're full screen, whether they can connect to the Internet etc. The zipped file is renamed .wgt and then they can be sent to a mobile phone (or Archos tablet, Nintendo Wii, Web TV, or anything else). The device's Widget Manager then unzips them and installs them automatically.
What's great about this is that it allows developer to make web-enabled applications that can look like native apps, but which are made with Web Standards. And, because they're made with Standards, they work anywhere that can support a full web browser.
At the moment, they're supported by Opera desktop, Opera for devices and Opera Mobile. Once the W3C specification is completed, we will amend our implementation to follow the Open Standard and expect other browser vendors to support them.
The mobile phone industry is very interested in Widgets. Vodafone Netherlands recently ran a Widgets development camp in Amsterdam to get developers making Widgets prior to their launch of a Vodafone appstore, which will allow developers to charge money for their work.
Each WEEK during the Vodafone and Betavine Summer of Widgets competition, three prize packages of a Samsung NC 20 Netbook bundled with a Nokia N96 handset will be awarded to the three best new widgets.
Even if you don’t win you can still feature your app in our Apps Shop live in eight countries across Europe! The competition starts on 6th July so that's three bundles, every week for the next eight weeks.
WIDGETIZE