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11/6/06
Mobile Widgets? Who Knew!
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Monday, November 6, 2006
7:54:00 PM EST
All of my friends have always said that Opera has the best mobile browser out there. Today, they did a live demo of their widget platform, including how to make a widget yourself. And dude - it's TOTALLY easy! It looks like HTML (well, maybe closer to XML), but still - absolutely simple. Really cool, and very possibly the kick I need to finally get off my butt and download Opera for my Palm. Even I could make one of these widgets. Also, they'll work, ideally, everywhere - on your phone and on the web.
Then came Nokia, who have created what they call "WidSets." It uses J2ME and a scripting language, which is proprietary to Nokia, so don't expect to see these working somewhere else. (the previous was corrected by Hedgewind via comments - a quick websearch shows that Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola all make J2Me phones.) 200 phone models support these (of course, not mine..) and they have over 800 user-created widsets. There's a WYSIWYG desktop client that is used to download and preview the WidSets, which then sync with your phone (like iTunes iPod sync). Examples of WidSets would be a Flickr reader that works via push (it sends updates when they are ready, instead of forcing your phone to continually check for updates), a blog reader, games, or a WidSet that lets you download WidSets directly to your phone instead of making you use the web client (a widget for widgets? I don't want to think too much about that one...). The push or pull thing is cool, but it's annoying that these are locked to Nokia via J2ME. Isn't the whole widget thing that these need to work anywhere on anything?
Verrry few people here actually use widgets on their phone, which isn't too much of a surprise, I think this is still an emerging field. I guess most of us haven't quite thought about how useful this would be? But there's no question they can be helpful - even with something as simple as an alert function - Nokia said that their WidSets can be set to ring (with a plain old ringtone) when they update. So, say, I want to know the second Panzer updates his Flickr stream. Tada, phone rings. Cool, but again, I don't have aNokia phone.
And, pending mindblowing announcements or demos, this hereby concludes my "liveblogging" of today's conference. Tomorrow I'll be at Web 2.0 to run around and meet various folks, then up to the Mountain View office of AOL on Wednesday.
This was a rather cool conference. I've met a lot of great people, and had some conversations that I think may result in real integrations. We'll see. The hallway, "food room," and even the bathroom (always happens at things like this - there are so few women we end up introducing ourselves to each other in the bathroom - ooh look! A girl!) were brimming with people I wanted to meet and integrate with, so who knows. I'm hopeful. I'm always hopeful. For a New Yorker, I'm surprisingly optimistic.
The cute boy count was also surprisingly high, for those who care, and I did manage to snag a few business cards. Not that I'm here scoping for a boyfriend or anything, but, hey, if I'm anything, I'm a decent flirt.
I'm off to cut off my aching wrists (weeee carpal tunnel!) and go eat (and drink) with the blogs team.
Until tomorrow...
Technorati tags: BamBam, mobile, Nokia, Opera, widgets, widgets live, WidSets
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7:54:00 PM EST
Mobile Widgets? Who Knew!
Then came Nokia, who have created what they call "WidSets." It uses J2ME and a scripting language,
Verrry few people here actually use widgets on their phone, which isn't too much of a surprise, I think this is still an emerging field. I guess most of us haven't quite thought about how useful this would be? But there's no question they can be helpful - even with something as simple as an alert function - Nokia said that their WidSets can be set to ring (with a plain old ringtone) when they update. So, say, I want to know the second Panzer updates his Flickr stream. Tada, phone rings. Cool, but again, I don't have aNokia phone.
And, pending mindblowing announcements or demos, this hereby concludes my "liveblogging" of today's conference. Tomorrow I'll be at Web 2.0 to run around and meet various folks, then up to the Mountain View office of AOL on Wednesday.
This was a rather cool conference. I've met a lot of great people, and had some conversations that I think may result in real integrations. We'll see. The hallway, "food room," and even the bathroom (always happens at things like this - there are so few women we end up introducing ourselves to each other in the bathroom - ooh look! A girl!) were brimming with people I wanted to meet and integrate with, so who knows. I'm hopeful. I'm always hopeful. For a New Yorker, I'm surprisingly optimistic.
The cute boy count was also surprisingly high, for those who care, and I did manage to snag a few business cards. Not that I'm here scoping for a boyfriend or anything, but, hey, if I'm anything, I'm a decent flirt.
I'm off to cut off my aching wrists (weeee carpal tunnel!) and go eat (and drink) with the blogs team.
Until tomorrow...
Technorati tags: BamBam, mobile, Nokia, Opera, widgets, widgets live, WidSets
Written by stephaniebambam Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 3 comments: (Add your own)
-
Hi BamBam,
great coverage of the conference! Just one correction. There is nothing in the technology of WidSets that is restricted to Nokia phones. The same J2ME and scripting language works on most phones out there that are J2ME-enabled. That's the main point of WidSets, there's one single client, which is very standards-based.
Thx! -
I did a presentation at WWW this year where I showed how to create a widget that works in Opera, Dashboard AND AIM Pages. Almost all the HTML-based widgets are easy to get started with. It gets harder when you get into the details.
11/7/06 12:08 PM
But that's good to know that Nokia Widsets can be used on other phones...purely out of curiousity, I'll go digging for a list of j2me phones later today.
And Kevin? That's so cool. :D I'm gonna write a dopey widget for all platforms, just watch. :)