This has been a week full of exciting events. It started on Monday with the release of Opera 9.1, which included the new real-time Faud Protection. Opera's Fraud Protection utilizes back-ends from both GeoTrust and PhishTank to ensure the best possible protection for the end users.
On Wednesday I had (thanks to Håkon) the very pleasant first encounter with the $100 laptop from the OLPC project. I would like to send a special christmas greetings to the people working on this project - keep on doing good!
Today we are very proud to release the preview of the Opera browser for the beautiful white Wii (I believe our CTO was up 2am this morning). The browser features some very unique innovations like the new Intelligent Zoom. This enables users to simply point the Wii Remote at the area of interest on the screen and Opera will automatically adapt the zoom level to fit the area. The browser will for example provide a different zoom level when reading an article on BBC than it will when logging in to Gmail. The feature is really great and its crucial for the user experience since TVs have much lower resolutions than today's PC monitors. Now I just need to get hold of a Wii - Perhaps I should make a Widget?
Happy x-mas browsing everyone - and long live the web!
Would you like to get personalized and always updated newsfeed directly on the idle-screen of your mobile phone? How about location based traffic information or a map service similar to Google Maps? This is what Opera, Telenor and FAST set out to test in a R&D study named 'Aida' earlier this year. The solution was tested on a large number of end users over many months and was very well received among the testers. Check out the video below from the solution running live on a Windows Mobile phone.
If you have problems understanding the text on the screen, it's most likely because it is in Norwegian
If you can figure out which web site the screenshots are from, you better be heading over to the competition page right way. Opera is handing out 60 prices including 10 Nintendo DS Lite. Too bad Opera employees aren't allowed to participate
Some days ago, TomSoft wrote an article discussing a few myths of the 'mobile Ajax'. I think many (including myself) share Thomas' view that it's important not to hype technologies, and that its important not to draw conclusions like 'the mobile web 2.0 equals mobile AJAX' (meaning that AJAX is something running in the browser). The Web 2.0 is a much broader term, and limit it to a single set of technologies does not make sense. He is also correct when stating the there are alternatives currently deployed on lots of mobile phones and that mobile AJAX is not a way to bypass the operators. In fact most of the interest in the world for Mobile AJAX solutions derives from Operators who are interested in superior user experiences across devices and medias.
What I question is the following:
Looks good, but unfortunately, I have no Ajax enabled browser out of the thousands of handsets we have here at MobileScope….
How you manage to have thousands of phones without an AJAX capable browser? Opera Mobile is estimated to ship on approximately 46 different handset model in 2006 and Nokia ships their new web browser on a significant model. This means that there are already millions of AJAX enabled mobile phone in the market.
Seems that the Write Once Run Anywhere myth is back!! It was actually already not achievable through technology designed for this, so I did not see how Ajax app (which is basically designed for one or two platform) will be able to address suddenly thousands of different platforms…..
I haven't heard anyone claim this anywhere. But we are in Opera reusing lots and lots of AJAX solutions on other devices than it was originally designed for. Whether SoonR in their demo reused any code from their PC version is not sufficient to argue otherwise.
So finally... OPERA mobile AJAX platform got themselves a partner... SOONR.com to develop a mobile ajax app running on their OPERA platform
This has nothing to do with Opera Platform. It's a standard AJAX application, that just happens to be running on a mobile phone rather than a PC. Opera Platform on the other hand is a full AJAX framework for creating user interfaces and applications with.
Summing up. The discussion points Thomas brings forward are very valid, but there is a clear difference between advocating for which technologies will succeed in the future and which ones are available today.
Test your web site to see if it’s ready for mobile customers.
They continue on their site saying
If you're not happy with what you see, - if you see anything at all – it's time to join the dotMobi Community by getting your .mobi domain name and optimizing your site for the mobile Internet.
The problem is that what their showing is not even close to what a user actual would see when visiting a web site with their phone. Especially is this the case when the site use media types to adapt the layout to the different screen resolutions. The screenshot on the right show this community site rendered in the emulator, while the one to the left show what it looks like in Opera 8.5 which is the web browser shipping on the Nokia N70.
Opera today announced that the next version of Opera for devices (which is used for TVs, set-top boxes, portable media players or even game consoles) will have support for Web Widgets. Opera already added support for Widgets in the Beta version of Opera 9 for PCs, and enabling support for this on embedded devices means that you might very soon be able to use your favorite widgets on your next TV or media player.
This is very cool!
Widgets are small web pages that resides outside the user interface of the web browser and are typically front-ends to online web sites. Some of my current favorite Widgets includes a football world-cup widget and off course the Slashdot news reader.
I never expected to develop an application for a TV, but this might just change that
Opera is working on making version 9 ready for mobile phones. One of the developers in the Symbian team in Opera recently posted a screenshot of Opera 9 showing the very advanced ACID2 test from WebStandards.org. The test was first passed by Safari from Apple before Opera passed it on desktop in March 2006. Opera for mobile is based on exactly the same rendering engine as the desktop browser and such all the good stuff will become available on millions of phones and other devices soon.
This is great news for web standards and for web developers!
