It’s been a while since I’ve worked on the widgets that I submitted to Opera Widgets. So I spent the last few days in my spare time just working on one of my most popular widgets…Google Translator. For the longest time it was handy, but not very well designed and the layout was poor…just a quick solution.
If you do translations from time to time or even often then you may find my widget very useful! You can convert text to and from many different languages and even web pages. The translations are done using ajax in the widget to fetch results from Google’s Translate service.
This widget, which is currently only available through Opera and Opera Widgets, happens to be a very popular widget and downloads count some where near ~82,000 at the moment.
I just uploaded version 2.1 yesterday, but the Opera team has to inspect the widgets to make sure there are no problems or possibly fraudulent activities going on in the background (kind of annoying since they don’t go live immediately and end up taking days, but worth the security).
Anyways, v2.1 included several improvements over the previous 1.42 (a.k.a. 2.0). An update notification is now included, the tabs are redesigned to match Gmail’s design a little closer, jQuery effects are now tied into the widget to make it more aesthetically pleasing to the eye, options were moved from a sloppy and quick side panel to the footer of the widget and can be toggled on and off, a more menu was added to pack in several more features that didn’t fit anywhere else (similar to Gmail’s more menu), useless images that could be replaced with css have been removed and a stylesheet has taken the burden off of inline styling which was never intended to be permanent..but a quick way to get the layout fixed right.
There are actually many many more changes and if you want to see a list then you can take a look at the changelog here.
I actually went above and beyond v2.1 almost immediately after publishing it. After creating a stable version (2.1) it was time to push the widget further, so v2.2 has many more fixes and updates. Optimizations are in progress and going well to reduce wasted code and duplicate elements that are not needed. There is actually a “Beta” version of v2.2pre1 on my Google Translator site. You can go a head and check it out if you want and see some of the updates from 2.1. It should be stable enough to use, but it’s not finalized just yet. 
Anyhoo, just wanted to update everyone who reads my blog! Hope you’re all using Opera or at least gave it an honest run. It’s a great browser, but sometimes you just can’t break away from the chains that tie you to another piece of software (most of us that would be Microsoft, lol).
Stay cool!
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