I'm Anders Sjögren and I am an Interaction Designer working with Unite and also one of the judges of the weekly competitions (be very afraid!).
I thought it would be a good idea to post some UX guidelines, and things that I look for when judging the applications, to help you win the competition!
Okay, here goes:
Make sure the application has a use-case When you are thinking about developing an application, think of the scenarios in which the application is going to be used in. Imagine yourself using the application in these scenarios. Also, some questions to think about could be: What is the purpose of the application? What service will this application provide? What problem is it trying to solve? What are the use-cases of the application? In what context is it going to be used (home/work/school/mobile/tv)?
Display the username and photo of the host of the application in the UI Since the application is going to look the same on all hosts (if no customization is available in the application which would bring huge bonus points from me ), it is important that the visitor can see who is hosting the application from the UI. Otherwise, the only way for the visitor to know who is hosting the applications is through looking at the username in the Web address.
Provide a link to the host's Unite Home If the visitor is interested in the other applications the host is running, he/she has to go to the host's Unite Home where the list of the running applications is shown.
Make the UI work on different resolutions and browsers People have different monitors with different resolutions, make sure to support at least 1024x768. Debug your application by testing it in different browsers since we all prefer different browsers (Opera, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer). If you'd like to pimp your UI, there are good JavaScript frameworks out there to help you.
Tips
Get feedback from your friends about your application
Test the application with friends
Ask people about ideas or improvements that could be useful
Every Monday we will announce a new application of the week. The developer is rewarded a gift card equal the value of a Nintendo Wii. All you have to do is create an Opera Unite application and submit it by 10 AM CET any Friday to enter the challenge. Read more and get all the details about the “Battle for the best Opera Unite applications” challenge.
We are really excited about you guys can create and we hope you take the challenge and start (or continue) to play around with Opera Unite and win a great prize in the meantime.
As always, please leave us your feedback in the comments below or in the Opera Unite forums.
Hey everyone! For the past couple of months the team has being working hard to bring Opera Unite to beta status, and today we are making it official with the release of Opera 10.10 beta. It goes without saying how much we appreciate your feedback. We hope you notice a lot of your suggestions implemented in the polished applications and overall improvements in both the browser and the server side.
If you have been using the snapshots the changes are going to be more gradual, but if you haven't tried Opera Unite in a while, I think you are in for a treat. Please pay special attention to Media Player, Photo Sharing and Messenger applications since they have received the most work and we are curious to read your comments.
Speaking of the Media Player, the guys next door made a pretty cool video (IMHO) which you can see below. If you like the song, visit My Opera to download it.
The Dev.Opera guys also created and updated some articles that you might find interesting:
A few builds ago, we had bundled a little surprise for our My Opera users. A Messenger application, which allowed you to chat with your friends on My Opera was made public.
Today we are releasing an update to the same application and this time it's going to be available for download from unite.opera.com at http://unite.opera.com/application/412/. It's a simple application that lets you communicate with your network of friends on My Opera in a new way. If you are a My Opera user, you should definitely try this application.
Again, do let us know what you think. You can leave you comments on the application page at http://unite.opera.com/application/412/ or even report a bug at https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/. The application is currently under development so it's the right time to request improvements
Along with fixing up and prepping Opera Unite to get ready for the next release, we put in time for usability testing and trying to make things simpler. As a result, we are going to make some changes, but we will try to make them gradual and get them out in phases.
One important change that we made public this week was that we will now refer to our services as Opera Unite applications. If you download the latest snapshot from the links in the sidebar, you can check out the first snapshot with this revision. We will update the websites and the service application repository as the snapshots become more stable.
What does this mean for developers? Use the .ua extenstion on your applications and serve it with the MIME type application/x-opera-uniteapplication. We will keep you updated on any relevant information.
What do you think? Does this make more sense to you as an Opera Unite user? Will it make it easier for your friend who visits your Media Player application? Let us know