Opera Widgets blog

At 3:00 AM Sunday, we announced the winners for Opera's first ever widget competition. We received almost 30 entries and across the board almost all were excellent. Picking the best was no easy task and we want to thank the designers who coded some of the most useful, well-designed widgets we've seen.

In third place, WidgetTetra by Brian 'GreyWyvern' Huisman. This is the most addictive widget we've seen in a long time.
It looks great and is amazingly easy to use. We haven't stopped playing it yet, which is why this post is somewhat delayed.

Brian won a Vivenco wireless headset courtesy of Digital Impuls.



Our runner up, Frederic Larsen created a Multifunctional Analog clock. Now, most people - including us - probably thought: "Not another clock widget." But Frederic went above and beyond by adding useful features like an alarm, countdown and a stopwatch. So congratulations, Frederic, by making us and all the other clock-
haters eat our words.

Frederic won a Beyerdynamic headset courtesy of Digital Impuls.


You've seen the runner-ups. So you know the winning widget had to trump them all. We hoped the prize, a true high-performance gaming system from our friends at Digital Impuls, would bring out the best and so it did. When we saw the winning widget, we immediately noticed that not only was it well designed and easy to use, it was also lightning fast. That it returns search results for a variety of sites including the Uncyclopedia and Urban Dictionary, well, that's just cool. So without further ado, let us introduce the winner of Opera's Widget Competition, Audun 'skyfex' Wilhelmsen and his creation, KnowledgeMate.


Audun takes home the Grand Prize from Digital Impuls.

We'd like to thank all the widget authors for submitting a truly unbelievable set of widgets. Also thanks to our co-sponsor Digital Impuls who pulled together an incredible set of prizes. If you're ever in Oslo, you should visit their store at Mollergata 9. If you're anywhere else in the world, check them out on the Web. We'd also like to thank Vivenco, Beyerdynamic, Mushkin, Mist, Logitech and Lian Li for co-sponsoring our prizes.

And finally, for all of the widget designers who entered and didn't win...keep watching this space for
another chance to trade your code for some very cool prizes.

This is a special post. It's a post about programs, about ideas, about simple things that are usually left unsaid. I'm sitting here at The Gathering surrounded by thousands of people who have come here to play games, write programs, learn about technology and generally have fun.

If I take the liberty to generalise a bit, those are the five things anyone looks for in anything. To play, to produce, to learn and to have fun are the basic fundamentals of life and - since I'm posting on this blog - the same holds true for widgets.

A perfect widget would like to be interactive, let the user play around with it. Give them some options - do you want a pink background? Would you like to set a custom background picked up from an online source - say Flickr?

As any normal person, I wouldn't really customize something unless I had something to do with it. Maybe I would use it to help me with some calculations - what's the time in Belgium when its noon in Bahrain? Maybe the widget could help me find some information by keeping a history of my searched words and/or links I accessed through it.

I'm not too much of book worm, and have read more things online (or offline, but sill on the computer) that on real paper. This leads me to think,"Have I learned anything?"

Of course I have! (2 + 2 = 5, for extremely large values of 2)

But then again, wouldn't it be great if you could learn something through your own widget. I wouldn't mind learning a new language. How about a dictionary for words from one language to the other?

And now we get to the best thing of all - fun!

I like having fun. I like it so much, I'd like to have some more! So how about making that Sudoku widget? Or any addictive game like snake or Pac-Man?

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People keep telling me that its tough to make a widget, and I keep telling them that a widget is not supposed to be tough. If it's getting tough, it's probably getting complicated and hence not-so-good in the first place.

Its not important to attach a clock, personal messenger and email client to every widget - keep it simple:)