Opera-mini bookmarklets

Recently I discovered that opera-mini supports javascript embedded into the bookmarks' urls. What that means is that bookmarklets that work on PC browsers should also work in opera-mini. Reading through the official Opera-Mini wishlist, few people are asking about web-based bookmarking etc. so this less-known feature could be quite handy for those people.
Entering lengthy urls into the bookmark manager is definitely not easy on a mobile devices, but deleting characters from an existing url should be acceptable.
So here is a quick how-to (using delicious as an example):

1. go to a specially formated url (see below)
2. hit #7 or menu->tools->Add bookmark
3. select and edit the Title if required (eg. Post to del.icio.us)
4. select Address field and remove all text that appears before the word 'javascript'
5. (optional) tick 'Display on start page'
6. Save bookmark

If you used step 5:
7. Use manage menu in bookmarks view to move-up the bookmark to position less then 10 (eg. position 4)
8. You can now use the bookmark with a shortcut key, eg. *4
9. Shortcut lisitng inside menu->tools->help will also be updated (in case you forget what your "post to delicious" shortcut is).

That's it. To bookmark any page you are viewing using delicious either use your shortcut key (eg. *4) or menu->bookmarks->post to delicious.

Note that the last browsed page will always be sumbitted, so you can't bookmark anything in your current browsing history (ie. after using the back softkey). Hit #0 to reload first and try again.

Some examples (you need to have an account with these and need to have privously ticked 'remember me' at login):

Post to Del.ici.us

Digg it!

Reddit

Sub with Blogines


Creating custom urls for other sites is pretty easy:
1. use the site's domain (eg. www.mydomain.com) for your baseurl so that opera mini can pickup the favorites icon
2. use # the separator between the url and javascript code (ie. www.mydomain.com/#javascript:)
3. use the sites exisiting bookmarklet code or modify one of the above by adjusting url parameters

Enjoy

--dean

MoMo Sydney

Great news for Sydney's mobilists: Shane and Tim have organized Sydney's first Mobile Monday gathering on the 9/9 at the Shellbourne Hotel starting at 7pm.

Mobile Gmail

Google has finally released a mobile interface to Gmail. I was waiting for this for a while now, even hacked the gmail-lite source to make it look good on mobile.
Seems like there are few teething problems, the page doesn't render in firefox (br element is not closed) and the style element is in the wrong place (should be inside the head not body element). Im also having problems retrieving contacts when composing a message.
Appart from that, its something you would expect from Google. The pages are quick and easy to browse, there are settings that let you configure which views to make visible.
A lot of content is transcoded on the fly (PDF, images) and displayed in the message, embeded links a re re-written to go through the google mobile proxy, embeded email addresses when clicked initiate new message composing, contacts can be dialed directly, etc.
They have pretty much used all mobile-browser capabilities.
As with google local mobile, which first had a xhtml version and then evolved into a full blown feature packed midp application, I would expect a similar evolution here: a complete email/IM application. (Let's not forget Talk, XMPP is nothing new on midp).

Well done Google, and keep up the mobile developments!
via Engadget

Google to acquire Opera

Very interesting rumors about Google buying Opera. It would make perfect sense. Google's Local for Mobile midlet is a great app, and with the amount of Google apis available, I was wondering if it was just an enticement of what's to come from Google in the mobile web arena.
Opera's recent announcement about Enabling AJAX applications on mobile phones would suddenly allow Google to bring all it's cool services straight to the mobile desktop. Your Personalized Home could become the new idle screen on your phone, keeping you up-to-date the news/weather/rss etc. Gmail and Talk would be just a click away, and utilizing the WAP -push technology, could offer some real advantages over sms (think storage, searching, cost, etc). Moblogging, pod/video-casting could become much easier.
On top of all that Google would get a decent desktop browser and a leading mobile browser too. I am sure they could probably share a few ideas between the Google mobile proxy and the Opera Accelerator.
Of course, there is no reason Google can't do any of this on its own but as Carlo points out:
But keep in mind what are Opera's most significant relationships: deals to get its browser on handsets from some of the world's top mobile phone manufacturers. That would be instant traction for Google on some very big real estate.

We'll have to wait and see ....

--dean