Out of the way

I was in Texas earlier in the week. Specifically, in Austin, Texas, for South by SouthWest. It's a big music and film and interactive festival. And I got to see almost nothing of it - no music except regular stuff on every week (Austin is a big live music town), no film, just some panels and standing around at the Opera booth.

I had a play with the Wii, when I first arrived in town and wasn't quite working. I even wrote most of a blog entry. Using the onscreen keyboard takes a little time to get used to, but by the end of a few paragrahs I had got used to it and was starting to appreciate the predictive text.

Unfortunately, just as I was winding up, someone came to talk about real work and I had to put the remote down and pay attention. When I had finished, someone else had come along and happily wiped out my blog entry (luckily they didn't wipe my entire blog at the same time, I suppose. The perils of working in public...).

The Wii is not a bad browser. Clearly designed for the gaming community, it takes a little while to get used to pointing to what you want. But the zoom feature is super-sweet. Not ust ordinary old Opera zoom, it actually works out what to focus, and makes that what it zooms.

And you can sit in front of it with your kids, and look for stuff you want to do. There are lots of cool things it could do, besides just looking at video sites. And talking to people I know who have one, a surprising (given that they all have computers everywhere, and it is really designed as a gaming machine) number of them are actually browsing with the Wii.

One of the highlights was giving one away. We ran a simple competition - put your name in the hat (Yep, it is chaals's hat ) and wear something with Opera on it to the draw at 4pm. We gave away t-shirts until we had none left. We gave away underwear, wrist straps, pins, stickers, anything that would qualify and was loose. And the crowd came. The hat was filled to and beyond the brim - I don't know how none of the names actually just fell out. But the first person drawn didn'tmanage to have anything Opera on - just a sticker from another browser. Ceding to the outraged crowd (surely they weren't just hoping that this time it would be them?) we re-drew, and the Wii was duly given away to a lucky winner who had made the effort to get a sticker on his shirt, followed by a phone and the last bits of swag we had around. Sorry to those who missed out, and like me still don't have a Wii.

Another highlight for me was giving a panel with Chris Wilson of Microsoft, Brendan Eich of Mozilla, moderated by Arun Ranganathan of AOL. I think it was one of the more interesting panels I have been on recently, and while it generated some digging at each other it was nice to see that it also contained a good deal of interesting and sensible comment.