Opera employees do lots of heavy lifting on standards.  During my involvement at the geolocation working group, I saw first hand the great to work that the Opera folks do (Hi Lars-Erik + Max!).  And it is really great to see that this work be put into a product and shipped.

I spend a bit of time looking at 10.6 and their geo implementation.  The info bar has the basic elements that a geolocation notification bar is suppose to have.  I will leave it to the Opera users to decided if this is a pretty notification bar or not… Notice that they did leave off a informational link that allows a user to get more information each time a geolocation request is performed.  We left that on so that people away can find a way back to the explanation of geolocation.  I also like the wording on the prompt… the browser shares the location data with the web page, but we do not transmit or send data.  It is a minor difference, but if the location is transmitted it is really the page that does it.

The first time you click “Share My Location”, you get a big modal dialog with a bunch of legalize in it that explain what geolocation is, and how it is used in Opera, and what providers, etc.  The text is pretty dense and will probably scare most people away.  I suppose much of the text is similar to the Firefox text.  There are some word smithing that could be done, but its a beta and Opera is probably still working on it.

Under the hood, Opera does use https when transmitting the geolocation data to and from Google’s Location Service.  They also expire the service cookie every two weeks and offer a way for the user to purge this value more frequently.  In my quick conformance tests, it looks like Opera behaves much like Firefox.

Overall, I am pretty happy with Opera’s Geolocation implementation.  Go Opera.  (btw, do I still get a t-shirt for saying that?)

For example:


navigator.orientation.watchOrientation(draw);

function draw(o) {
// o.x, o.y, o.z
}

o in function draw is a vector in three dimensional space in meters /
(seconds^2) units.

This allows you to do some revolutionary stuff on the web. This is a simple test web page that moves a ball around a web page. I am just loading this web page directly with XUL Runner on Windows Mobile Professional 6.

Device Orientation on YouTube

This only supports exists on HTC devices but i do expect other devices that have accelerometers to have implementations.

I am tracking this feature in bug 485943. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2_6bGNZ7bA]