Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Good News: I WON Opera Travel Widget Contest

I am feeling really delighted to tell that I have won the Opera Travel Widget Contest with my entry Travel Mate. As a grand prize I will also be getting a Windows Mobile Phone from Opera soon.

Major reasons for Travel Mate's success as specified by Opera were very positive user reviews, high ratings, its simplicity and usefulness. I am really thankful to all those who helped me by using Travel Mate and by giving their feedback.

After winning this contest I am feeling the same spirit in me, I started with few years ago.
And now I will continue with the same spirit and move towards achieving my objectives in life.

Public announcement by Opera | Travel Mate's blog

Monday, June 4, 2007

Travel Mate now ready to travel with you

After several nights of hard work and research I proudly announce the release of Travel Mate.
Travel Mate provides all the important information and tools that a traveler really looks for before leaving on any trip.

Special care has been taken while designing the widget and while making it, so as to ensure maximum user satisfaction. Keeping stability of the widget in mind none of the features in Travel Mate try to capture, grab or scrape any information from other websites.

Well know Internet giants like Yahoo, Google, Weather Bug are the source of information that makes it highly reliable and a stable solution.

You can downloaded Travel Mate from:
http://widgets.opera.com/widget/6945
If you like the widget then I would really appreciate your vote.

Below are few screen shots so that you can get a feel of it and be tempted to get it for your self and experience it.

Developed at Vinsol


I am currently working at Vinsol (Vinayak Solutions Pvt. Ltd.) and I would like to share my experience that I had with my colleagues while developing Travel Mate.

All of us work like a team and it was really enjoyable to talk with others and get their views, I can still remember Gaurav telling me again and again to make the widget look more prettier and he actually did wanted to help me by making the design. But unfortunately I could not manage to have it in the first release.

And yes I don't even remember how many times Sid would have told me about increasing the size of widget so that he could see the map properly.

Then Rishav, he actually did serious stress testing of my widget, may be for fun so that he could tease me, but that really helped. Thanks to his testing that I added rounding off in currency converter.

Everyone constant feedback really helped me make Travel Mate a highly user friendly widget.

Thanks to all of you :)

Saturday, June 2, 2007

#flightGrid {overflow:auto;} [Scrolls the widget]

For displaying flight results I am having a layer that is overflow auto:

#flightGrid {
overflow:auto;
}

So that I can get scroll bars for data grid. But the widget was having problems with this property and that is when content of layer is scrolled to the bottom after there is no content remaining to be displayed the widget scrolls up and goes out side the widget working area hence it would not remain visible.

After searching on internet I found a solution that is, if I fix the position of layout then no matter what happens inside the layout, it will not hold its position exactly as specified.

#layout {
width:400px;
height:200px;
position:fixed;
top:1px;
left:1px;
}

I found this web page useful: http://www.w3schools.com/css/pr_class_position.asp

So finally I could resolve this issue :)