Developer interview 'Attila Magyar'

Introduction

My name is Attila Magyar and I'm a physicist and computer scientist student from Hungary. Software development is my main hobby. I've developed this widget with one of my friends, Denes Csepely. He is a J2EE developer and works on typically large scalable Java backends, using EJB, Spring framework and several other cool technologies.

I started programming in high school and after I've tried several technologies including low level programming such as Assembly and C, I moved to Java and Python. Currently these are my favourite programming languages.

Why mobile widgets?

Mobile widgets have several great advantages, and limitations as well. If you are developing on this platform you have to exploit these advantages and try to avoid the drawbacks. That's why it is interesting.

What inspired you to write the Widget?

A friend of mine has created a desktop application in Delphi with similar purpose earlier. The original idea come from him.

How have you developed the Widget?

We have separated the development process into two parts. Denes was working on the backend, and I was working on the frontend. I've only used a syntax highlighting text editor and JQuery for the development. I had mostly rich client development experiments, and developing a thin client using HTML/CSS and JavaScript was fairly unhandy at first.

An OOP widget toolkit with a statically typed language is more powerful in my opinion. But I admit that with HTML and JavaScript you can create very nice looking applications in a short time. And it has other advantages such as portability as well.

Have you any advice for other developers?

I recommend to download other widgets and study the source code. And of course check the tutorials and forums on Betavine. Graphics and design are very important when you are making widgets. In many cases it is more important then functionality.

Unfortunately most programmers don't have graphics skills and graphics designers don't have programming experiments. This is one of the disadvantages of widget development. So try to contact people who have graphics experiments and involve them in the development.

What’s good and what needs improving?

The support on Betavine and dev.opera.com is great. But the widget emulators, I know, are not capable of fully emulate a real mobile device. It is not a trivial problem to solve since each phone is different. But emulators need to be improved in some way.

How did the BV website help you?

When I first used Betavine, I was already familiar with dev.opera.com. So it wasn't necessary to check all information or tutorials. But the forum was fairly useful.

Do you have a demo/video clip?

Not yet, but I think the best way to introduce an application is to present a nice demo video about it. It is more informative and attractive than a text-based description or even a screenshot. So, probably I will do one.

What is your favourite app/Widget on Betavine and why?

There are a lot of cool widgets and applications on Betavine, it is really hard to choose. I like EasyWeather. It is very handy, I often use it on my desktop.

What feature would you like to see brought to the Betavine platform/community?

I had no problem to find the required information about widget development. But some tutorial like screen cast about the development process would be useful in my opinion.

How did you hear about the Vodafone-Betavine Widget competition?

I've read about Betavine Widget competition in one of the Opera developer forums. I like competitions very much, so I contacted my friend and we got started to plan the widget.