14 DAY TRIAL // Norwegian software company Opera is already known for its plans to offer its mobile browsers to a wider range of smartphone operating systems on the market, and now we learn that it made more advancements in the area, as it released a new version of the Opera Mobile Widgets Manager. According to the company, the solution has been rebuilt based on the cross-platform UI framework available with Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, but it also packs inside a nice series of new features, so that users can enjoy a unified experience on more mobile platforms.
What the new Mobile Widgets Manager from Opera comes around with includes the Opera Presto 2.4 engine, along with a series of new “hooks to further empower widget developers,” such as OAuth support, a notification mechanism, multiple icon sizes, live icons, and more. The Opera Presto 2.4 is expected to deliver the latest Web technology to mobile phones, though it does not come with Vega accelerated rendering enabled, which means that certain CSS transitions or background features are not supported.
[admark=1]Other features of the new Mobile Widgets Manager include: - By default, links are opened in the default browser of the platform. However, a widget may invoke a limited browser for authentication purposes (OAuth). Any URL loaded by calling window.open(url) will be opened inside the Widget Manager application. The preinstalled Facebook widget uses this feature. - By default, the Widget Manager uses a virtual cursor that is moved by the arrow keys of the keyboard. If, for example, a game widget listens to key events and does not need a virtual cursor, the latter can be turned off by setting the cursor CSS property to none. - Widgets can send notifications to the Widget Manager by calling widget.showNotification(text). - A widget’s author may use one or more static icons. The Widget Manager will use the icons with the most appropriate size. - When a widget is minimized, docked mode is invoked, which is a mode wherein the widget renders and displays in a minimized state with a smaller viewport, resulting in a so called “live icon”. - Widgets can be debugged remotely via the Opera Dragonfly developer tools.
According to the software company, the new technologies included in the solution will offer developers the possibility to come up with mobile applications built for handsets powered by Microsoft's Windows Mobile OS, or by the Symbian S60 platform. Additional mobile clients will enjoy support within the following months, the company notes, adding that developers will certainly enjoy the fact that they won't have to recompile each app for every OS.
Download Opera Widgets for Windows Mobile Download Opera Widgets for Symbian S60
