Opera Widgets blog

The Web applications team has finally determined a winner from the "Show Us Your Skills!" contest we hosted back in December, last year. We know many of you have waited a long, long time for the results, so without further ado we're proud to present the winners:

Widget:	Judges' Notes:
Project Velt	This is a full-featured web-based slideshow generator. Every aspect of this widget has been made to such perfection that we simply could not overlook it. From default templates to saving your own files, formatting text to exporting it as a presentation - this Widget has everything. It even has an in-built clock! As a result of this, we're proud to crown gyrobo as the winner of our contest and will therefore receive a Nintendo Wii with Guitar Hero III and 2 guitars.
RoadTrip	This widget will search for the best route to visit a list of locations. This widget has got style. It manages to put together the Google Maps API with an awesome user interface - making it one of the best widgets we received for this competition.
3D Mesh Demo	Wii Opera SDK demo 3D mesh Widget.
PlanetWerks	An interactive, educational and accurate Solar System simulation.
TriMet Transit Tracker	This tracks public transit in Portland, Oregon, United States.
Social graph	Social graph for all My Opera blogs.

So, there you have it folks. Big congrats to all the winners! Since we don't want anyone to leave empty handed we will award the other five great entries with Opera goodie-bags.

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.