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The popular weather site (at least in the United States) AccuWeather.com recently added a link to an Opera Widget that displays the 5-day weather forecast (See screenshot on the right).

Features of the weather widget include: global coverage, real-time updates, satellite photos, local time display, moon phases, grass pollen count, UV index, humidity levels, space-saving ‘mini mode’, forecasts for up to 5 days, US or metric units.

This widget, called “TouchTheSky”, has been one of the more popular Opera Widgets since widget support was added in the Opera browser, with close to 400,000 downloads.

Opera Widgets work wherever there’s a full Opera browser. The same widget should be able to work across all devices, be it the desktop browser, mobile phone browsers, or even your TV. Widgets make perfect sense for devices where bandwidth is limited, such as mobile phones, since only the actual data is updated each time, unlike a standard webpage where the data and page style details (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) are download every time.

Links: Opera Widgets Homepage :: Weather Widget

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12 Comments

  1. 1 AleksOD

    Wow, good news for Opera! More popularity ;)
    While it is all nice and wonderful, I am having a great deal of problems with the accuweather website. It is displayed HORRIBLY in Opera while working just fine in other browsers. Does anyone else experience this? I know this is more of a question for Opera forums, but I decided to give it a shot along with my comment :)

  2. 2 babox

    This is a great news for Opera! :)

    PS. Also congratulations to johnnysaucepn ;)

  3. 3 Anonymous

    What version of Opera are you using?

    I am using 9.10 (Build 8649), and it renders nearly identically to IE, with no errors and everything is viewable as it should be.

    Time to upgrade, perhaps? :)

  4. 4 johnnysaucepn

    Hey, thanks for the plug!

    I’m using 9.02, and don’t seem to have any problems with the site rendering. I haven’t compared to IE, but it certainly doesn’t look ‘wrong’.

    The AccuWeather site gets nicely branded with a welcome banner when you visit it from within touchtheSky, which is fun. As an aside, there’s also a certain amount of interest in the possibility of widgets being available on the Nintendo Wii.

  5. 5 Zyphbear

    In this article, it is mentioned widgets are for all types of devices and perfect for mobile and wii and such, but the widgets are not compatible with opera mini. Please update this information, because while I would love to use some widgets on my BlackBerry for things like weather and auctions. Thanks.

  6. 6 Daniel Goldman

    Zyphbear, widgets don’t work in Opera Mini yet, it’s not a regular browser, it’s a thin client.

  7. 7 AleksOD

    hmmm… I am using 9.02 and it just renders in a very horrible and wrong way… I guess it is time to upgrade ;)

  8. 8 AleksOD

    By the way, if you want to see how badly the rendering actually is, go to this forum post:
    http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=168494

  9. 9 Alexey Feldgendler

    Is it the first time when a third party promotes/endorses an Opera widget?

  10. 10 Philip Seyfi

    2Alexey Feldgendler: I’m pretty sure that yes…

  11. 11 Hmm

    Nope, not the first time :)

    trafikanten.no etc.

  12. 12 johnnysaucepn

    Nope, not the first time

    trafikanten.no etc.

    http://trafikanten.no/trafikkinfo/sis/smaprogram.html, if you want to check!