Opera Widgets Style Guide

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Friday, 8. September 2006, 11:02:26

geirp

Posts: 38

Norway

Opera Widgets Style Guide

Opera have published a new style guide for Opera Desktop Widgets. It's our hope that the style guide will aid developers in creating more useful widgets.

The only requirement the style guide puts on developers is to include a close button on the widget.

Friday, 8. September 2006, 12:00:11 (edited)

grafio

Posts: 158

http://my.opera.com/community/dev/widgets/styleguide/

Widgets may optionally have a configuration button. Place it to the left of the close button, and use the widget gear as symbol.

http://my.opera.com/community/dev/widgets/first/

We’re still not the fashion police, but it is highly encouraged that widgets using a configuration view use them in the same way as illustrated in this tutorial:
(...)
5. The flip button should be in the lower right corner of the widget

People may get confused a bit

BTW, I was thinking about detecting MacOS in my widget and placing the close button in the top-left corner in this case.

Friday, 8. September 2006, 13:16:42

geirp

Posts: 38

Norway

There are some inconsistencies between the style guide and examples and widgets published by Opera. We will get these fixed as we move along. The style guide has it right.

Monday, 11. September 2006, 11:30:54

Benjamin Joffe

Posts: 189

Australia

I think it would be great if one of you opera guys created a few sets of buttons that can be used by people instead of hunting around or creating them ourselves. The ones I am talking about are these: http://my.opera.com/community/graphics/dev/widgets/interactivity.png, for close, configure etc.

Monday, 11. September 2006, 14:40:46

albertrosa

AlRo

Posts: 82

USA

that would be nice for those of us who lack the design elements. I do like rules and follow them as close as possible, I hate re-creating the wheel. which is the reason why most of my widget follow a style that I have found to work better in my design process. Yet I can always adjust it later

But definately understand the rules and plan to adjust all 15 widgets according to these new standards where applicable.

Friday, 15. September 2006, 14:07:29 (edited)

gautam_chandna

Gautam Chandna

Posts: 125

Norway

You're wishes just came true:)
Take a look at http://my.opera.com/community/dev/widgets/resources/

Friday, 15. September 2006, 14:10:27

albertrosa

AlRo

Posts: 82

USA

yea now we talking i am getting better here I was about to buy a digital camera and start taking pics of surfaces lol but i still might sounds like a good idea i just might post to my picture blog awsome i'm falling in LOVE here!!

Saturday, 23. September 2006, 15:59:53

shadowk

Widget Samurai

Posts: 81

Romania

i downloaded a file called all_icons.zip from the widget resources and it looks like there is no trace of the settings button inside that arhive. I do not have Photoshop so i can't do anything with the psd file...Could somebody confirm that the settings button is missing from the arhive?

Thanks

Monday, 25. September 2006, 15:42:27

gautam_chandna

Gautam Chandna

Posts: 125

Norway

shadowk: Sorry about that, the file has been updated to include the config buttons.

Thursday, 19. June 2008, 02:36:44

moginspace

Posts: 6

USA

This article attempts to explain how we can make our widgets dockable: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/adding-a-docked-mode-to-your-widgets/

Unfortunately I have trouble understanding it as I'm new at it (I commented on the article there but no help yet). I have made a widget but now I want to make a button to have it go smaller and larger when the user clicks it, which is most likely a best practice when styling widgets.

Any other tutorials on how to make a dockable button or code samples to do this would be appreciated. This is certainly a good styling practice for widgets and I'd really like to learn how to do it.

Thursday, 19. June 2008, 08:18:17

johnnysaucepn

In a maze of twisty little messages, all alike

Posts: 5520

United Kingdom

@moginspace, you might be better off creating a new thread, people might not look at a resurrected thread from two years ago.

Having said that - currently, the desktop Opera browser doesn't support docking widgets. It's mainly designed for devices like mobile phones, where you haven't got the space to see more than one widget fully-expanded at a time. Who knows, maybe this will change in a future desktop version, but it's not available for now.

Saturday, 6. September 2008, 13:36:13

geraldoa

Banned User

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