Wii + Opera + GWT

[Dan Morrill]

For your curiosity, or perhaps just your amusement, I present the following information.

Nintendo released the Opera port for the Wii in NTSC markets today.  (Actually, they released a "trial" version, so some of the material below may not be true when they release the final version.)  In the name of science, I downloaded it and pointed it at the Kitchen Sink and other apps on code.google.com.

Here are some results and comments:
- Text selection doesn't work at all, because the Wii has no keyboard.  It uses an on-screen keyboard picker, so there is no way to even select text, let alone retrieve or manipulate the selection.   (Actually, you might be able to set the selection, but I'm not sure how much good that would do you since the user can't do it manually.)

- The DialogBox demo tab displays the popup dialog, but then something crashes the whole event loop and no JS events appear to fire again until you do a page reload.

- Trees sometimes stop working, under circumstances which I haven't quite pinned down.

- Frames don't work.  (The Frames demo loads, but loads a blank page when you click an arrow.)

- The DynaTable demo was actually rather fast -- at least as fast as Firefox on my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.  So, it seems to be a nice, fast implementation (since the Wii's processor is nowhere near as fast as a Core 2 Duo.)

- Borders on buttons are broken (meaning that if you click a button a partial border remains afterward) but I think this might be an Opera/CSS problem more than a GWT or JavaScript issue.

- There are some more subtle issues too that a developer might want to consider.  For example, the text is readable on the Wii in the default view mode, but only barely.  You really have to zoom in to be able to easily read the text, but then you have to pan around the page which has obvious usability consequences.

- External window popups (i.e. alert()s, confirm()s, etc.) are full-screen;  that is, they replace the entire display, since the Wii has no window manager and programs run strictly modally. As a result, alerts and similar dialogs have no other option but to grab the whole display and act as full-screen windows.  This is kind of confusing to the user, but most importantly seemed pretty slow ( e.g. 1 - 2 seconds with a full screen redraw to show the dialog, then the same to go back to the browser window.)

- There is (of course) no debugging support so it's hard to tell what's actually going on in some of the cases above.  There does not even seem to be any notification of a JavaScript execution error, which is understandable given the target audience.

Everything else seems to work fine. (History, tabs, RPC, JSON...) I don't have Opera installed on any of my desktop systems, so it would be interesting if someone who does could check the above list and see how many, if any, of these issues also exist in the desktop version.  Anecdotally, the Wii Opera port seems to work quite a bit better with GWT than the port to Windows Mobile.

So, there you have it -- the answer to the question that everyone wanted to know:  does GWT work on the Wii??  Before you dismiss this as a mere amusement, though, consider that cell phones are the primary mode of connectivity in some parts of the world, and a browser on a games console is not too terribly different in capabilities and UI from one on a cell phone.

- Dan Morrill

[Sandy McArthur]

What I want to know is where did you find a Wii. They are no where to
be seen in my town unless you waited in line since before 4am. :-)

Opera isn't my primary browser but I am impressed that they claim to
use the same code base for everything from desktop versions down to
mobile phone versions.

[bg]

Hey great info, it's nice to know this stuff. As far as getting a Wii
or PS3, sounds like its hit or miss. I had a buddy get a ps3 today
because he happened to be at the store when they announced the arrival
of a few systems. I got myself a 360, one of two MS products that I
think are excellent, the other being the wireless notebook mouse I use
in my MacBook Pro. Anyway, back to the topic at hand...

It would be great to have full opera support on the Wii, but i think
its more on opera and nintendo at this point than google. Obvious
changes need to be made using the wii remote, so certain things that
seem trivial with a mouse all the sudden are not. Text selection,
window dragging, among other things will have to be done differently.
I dont have a wii, so I really don't know how they went about
implementing these things.

[Ed Burnette]

The Wii browser is just an alpha version right now, so this is an
excellent time to file bug reports against it and get them fixed. If
people file them in the GWT google code tracking system, would Google
be kind enough to batch them up and work out the compatibility issues
with Nintendo and Opera? It seems like a nice target market for GWT
applications - maybe you could even write Wii channels using GWT at
some point.

BTW, at our house, Santa had to get one from eBay this year after
standing in several early morning lines didn't pan out.

--Ed
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette

[Dan Morrill]

That's a neat idea, Ed!  I don't know a whole lot about the Wii's channel mechanism, but that would be a pretty nifty idea if it's possible.

In the meantime, I found the Opera bug report page and submitted one.  Who knows if it will go anywhere, but at least we've done our part!

- Dan Morrill

[Michael Neale]

Dan, I still think the Wii does *not* qualify as a work expense, despite your "work" activitied on it ;)

Michael
Chief Auditor,
IRS