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Opera Widgets blog

And the winner is...

By gautam_chandna. Tuesday, 18. April 2006, 12:47:54

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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.

The competition has endedCompetition?

Comments

johnnysaucepn 18. April 2006, 12:58

skyfex, you cheeky so-and-so! Keeping us all in the dark!
Congratulations to you, and to you runners-up - all well-deserved.

Edit: just noticed Bradford at least gets to appear in the 'Editor's Picks' box for a little while!

skyfex 18. April 2006, 13:01

I'd like to thank IvIoyner, Mongeland, Lord_Kamikaze, Kackoo and JRP from the internet forum freakforum.nu for moral support and ideas at The Gathering. And also Andreas Hysing (also present at TG06), who suggested I write a widget. I want to thank Macromates for the excellent texteditor TextMate, and for the name inspiration, and John Resig for the great JS library jQuery, and for helping me learn javascript.
Big thanks goes to Opera Software for the best compo prize ever. You guys are mad ^_^ You also create awesome software, keep it up. Thanks to Digital Impulse too for putting together the computer. I'll definetely shop more with you from now on (I'm going to need a DVI cable for the screen :wink:)
HUGE thanks to the guys at the Opera stand at TG06, who were always available for questions, support, or just to chat if they were available. Best bunch of people I've ever met.

Edit:
johnnysaucepn: Sorry, I thought I'd let Opera have the honor :wink:
Grats Brian and Frederic, they were really nice widgets.

gautam_chandna 18. April 2006, 13:03

Congratulations skyfex!
I was at the gathering for the first two days, so I didnt get a chance to meet you in person, great work!

and johnnysaucepn, just so you know, Bradford deserves to be in the Editor's picks!

Great widgets guys!!

sykora 18. April 2006, 13:40

Well done man! Good job.

GreyWyvern 18. April 2006, 13:44

Ha! I should have known something was up when you knew what widgets won second and third, but didn't tell us which one was first :wink: I didn't clue in.

Congratulations skyfex! I see you just joined the Opera Community, probably because of this competition. I hope you decide to stick around!

As for my widget, I would like to thank the fact that I wrote almost the very same game code about nine years ago (has it been that long? :eek: ) in QBASIC, and still have the program in my old QBasic folder. Up until about two days before I submitted it, it was still going by its original name "Mad Russian Blocks" :wink:

skyfex 18. April 2006, 14:01

GrayWivern: Muahaha, I'm leaving with the prize and will never return again. ;P I like Opera, but has been a Safari/Firefox fan since about the time I got my PowerBook (I now use Camino). Before that I used Opera though. But I love a lot of the new stuff they're doing.. And hope to contribute more looking forwards.

Investor 18. April 2006, 14:02

Congrats Audun....
hmm... loved it at first site, it works great... again thanks :up:

johnnysaucepn 18. April 2006, 14:07

@GreyWyvern, I wish I'd thought of that! I too, have a QB Tetris game I wrote about 9 or 10 years ago. Sadly, I think I lost my sourcecode in an earlier hard disk crash.

Jakub81 18. April 2006, 14:38

All the widgets are great, congratulations.

robodesign 18. April 2006, 14:40

Congrats!

Ramunas 18. April 2006, 15:15

Congrats man, you deserve it, keep up the good work :smile:

dakakri 18. April 2006, 16:47

yea.. cogratulations again man.. I said it to you IRL at TG, but again.. awsome widget..

I had a little entery myself, but nothing close to your stuff. But for thouse of you who are intrested I'm planning on a little walkthoug on how I made my first widget in my blogg...
It is not all that complicated, but I will try to explain as good as i can.

Again, congrats to all the winners, and thank you Opera for a nice time at your stand at TG!

Aux 18. April 2006, 16:59

Congrats for winners! And blame for me not to finish widget in time...

skyfex 18. April 2006, 17:34

Heh, I finished 10 minutes before deadline btw. I was sitting in the Windows Vista presentation from 15.00 programming the last bits for the Widget on my laptop ^_^

realGWolf 18. April 2006, 18:01

congrats :hat:

dakakri 18. April 2006, 18:55

I too finished my widget like 2 min before deadline...
some last minute debug and redesign... :wink:

FataL 18. April 2006, 20:09

Nice!

Guille 18. April 2006, 21:00

Those widgets are great!, congrats to the winners.

danielcs 18. April 2006, 23:20

Wow.. I should have tried harder, judging by the winners I think my widget might have had a good chance. Unfortunately the deadline was too tight and I had never made a widget before.

I'll try to finish it and keep it for a next contest.

Congrats to the winners, the KnowledgeMate is very cool! :up:

Aux 19. April 2006, 06:44

In two hours before deadline I did not have a two-hour-to-finish code and no design at all (: And I read about competition six hours before dead-line... Anyway I like TETRIS! (:

P.S. Is there any photo of super-computer?

skyfex 19. April 2006, 12:36

Aux: They took some photos at TG, but dunno what they did with them. Here are my photos:
http://my.opera.com/skyfex/albums/

guangzhou 19. April 2006, 15:04

nice,and congrats

skyfex 20. April 2006, 08:01

I found an album with images from the Opera booth:
http://my.opera.com/haavard/albums/show.dml?id=8

joseherrera 27. April 2006, 02:05

congratulations, opera good job.

joseherrera 27. April 2006, 02:05

congratulations, opera good job.

apc001 7. May 2006, 22:48

hello~

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