Developer interview 'Demian Turner'

Introduction

My name is Demian Turner and my company is Seagull Systems http://seagullsystems.com, which I founded a few years ago for client work.

Now I work with a small team of designers and developers to deliver solutions across a range of technologies including PHP/MySQL, iPhone apps, widgets, SEO services and consulting.

Why mobile widgets?

Like many I recognised the Opera widget platform as a great way to better serve our customers and extend our apps onto mobile devices. We hope the standard becomes widely adopted with a push to mainstream in the near future. We're definitely planning to make future versions of our apps on this platform and to spread the word to fellow developers and customers alike.

What inspired you to write the Widget?

Well late last year we released a product called Doris, basically it's a task management web app with a focus on simplicity and usability with our best take on a killer web2.0 interface [http://beta.dorisapp.com/]. We quickly realised that where this app is needed most is on mobile devices.

After releasing the iPhone version we got a lot of complaints that we were elitists and Mac snobs so we started to look around. At about the same time our designer Ryan Shelton spotted the Betavine widget contest and we thought we'd take a crack at it.

How have you developed the Widget?

We had the small advantage of only needing to make a mobile version of an existing app. And we already had the iPhone version of Doris. So with the designer and developer we all studied the Betavine platform docs in detail.

Taking into account the limitations of the widget platform, the developer, Dmitri Lakachauskis, prepared detailed mockups of the app in Balsamiq, which he handed over to Ryan. Ryan was quiet for a few days then came back to us with 19 detailed photoshop concepts for all the screens and all their states.

We were really impressed with his work and didn't change a thing. Then Dmitri implemented the screens and interactivity with the usual XHTML, CSS, Javascript and jQuery. The results were identical to the photoshop concepts.

Without going into too much detail, the widget is integrated with the Doris API, so most of the clicks invoke API calls and you can sign up to the free service if you don't have an account.

One bonus was that the widget code required only really minor tweaks to function as an OSX Dashboard widget, which we promptly released. We got lucky and the result was featured by Apple for a week during which we did 36k downloads!

Have you any advice for other developers?

If you've already done an Opera widget I'd recommend you release it in all possible permutations, ie Google gadget, OSX Dashboard widget, facebook widget, etc, etc. If you haven't done one yet I'd suggest you get your team into widget development asap, there's a big demand in the marketplace and plenty of business to be won.

What’s good and what needs improving?

In general we found the platform quite straightforward to work with. The fact that you can develop in Javascript and CSS opens the doors to the masses which is great. Unlike the iPhone ;-) Dmitri tells me the Dragonfly debugging component of the Opera browser was quite kludgy to work with, I guess that could be improved.