widgets++

My first Opera widget is available. I designed it to take up as little desktop space as possible (a 22x22px icon) until you click it, which opens the interface and queries del.icio.us to show your latest bookmarks. By default, when you click a bookmark, the page opens in Opera and the widget “minimizes” back to the icon. I’ve followed Opera’s guidelines in using their standard “flip” button for preferences, and these persist after you close and reopen the widget.

For people who browse full screen, I’m still not sold on the widget concept, or at least Opera’s implementation, which is only slightly less limiting in functionality as a web page. The only big advantage widgets offer to, say, bookmarklets (since BM can open windows), is the persistent storage, which is thankfully larger than the cookie 4K limit. The testing and build process needs improvement; you have to delete the previous version in Opera, clear the cache, make a zip of the folder, serve it with a special content-type and reinstall in Opera. Easier testing can be done by including Javascript that emulates the widget API if it’s not available, but this still won’t allow cross-domain XHR requests, so for some widgets your workflow has to be tweak-rebuild-retest-repeat.

11 thoughts on “widgets++

  1. Kalpesh says:

    How about adding a link to the delicious directly using the widget?

  2. kyran says:

    Enjoying your widget (once i’d figured how to minimize it) – well-done and thanks. Multiple tag queries, space separated, don’t work for me. Don’t think my delicious set-up is particularly esoteric but more than one tag returns a blank. If i’m missing some magic command i’d love to know what it is.

    cheers,
    kyran

  3. kyran says:

    have found the ‘magic’ method – thanks again for a great widget!

  4. cbrevard says:

    How does one post to (add) a bookmark or site to their delicious account? I suppose I could use a bookmark for this….

  5. newtoo says:

    Great widget!

    Wishlist:
    1. a list of the tags, preferably bundled
    2. an interface to add a new bookmark
    3. an interface to import/export tags between Opera and del.icio.us

  6. GeekK says:

    Hi,

    I love this widget, but…

    The widget stopped working here, maybe changes in API?
    Redownloaded it, but no go. No problems with other widgets.

    Just white space. Minimize and preference buttons don’t work.

    (also posted this at the widget page)

  7. I don’t want all the people to be able to se my links so I have made them “private” is there a possibility that the widget can be expanded to handle those?

  8. evan says:

    Great idea, but some things to add:

    alphabetize option
    search (by tag or name)
    enable adding sites in widget (does Opera have another way?)

  9. johan says:

    slimer with more height so it works as the firefox panel version of del.icio.us plugin. Also Support for adding bookmarks would be cool

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