Opera Unite

Hey all Unite people!

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.

To display the photo of the host, use this API: http://my.opera.com/{username}/picture.pl?xscale={number} and replace username and number with proper values (e.g. sjogren, 100, and dont' forget to remove the curly braces ).

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
  

That's it for now and good luck in the competition everybody!
Battle for the best Opera Unite applications

Resources:
Ten Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen
Usability - Wikipedia

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:

• Yusef: the Unite Server Framework
• Opera Unite developer’s primer — revisited
• A close-up look at developing your own Opera Unite application

Again, thanks for your support. Please let us know what you think in the comments and report any bugs in the Opera Unite forum.

Opera 10.10 beta downloads

• Windows MSI / Windows Classic
  
• Macintosh (Intel-only) / Macintosh (Universal)
  
• UNIX/Linux

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

ps - make sure you keep those Sonars running