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Geeky Opera blog post

eduMap widget

I am happy to announce the release of my second Opera widget: eduMap!

This 100% SVG-based widget lets you learn the location of countries, states and capitals around the world. It currently doesn’t work in Opera 9.5 for some reason (weird, since that’s where I tested it on most!), but I hope to resolve that shortly Fixed in latest versions.

Inspiration for this widget came from the excellent website purposegames.com, which has the same basic premise. However, all its games are Flash, and I wanted to make an SVG version. Also, I wanted to add more modes and options to the games (for example, where the country is highlighted and you select its name from a list).

Basic knowledge of the location of other countries seems to be sadly lacking in the United States, and I believe this may be a small, but great way to help change that. As an added bonus, it might help inspire other developers to use SVG over Flash.

Feel free to leave any feedback and bug reports on the widget’s page, and stay tuned for updates.

Enjoy!

4 replies on “eduMap widget”

Hey, cool! No, I hadn’t seen that before, looks neat!

I did check initially if someone had already made a widget of this kind, since SVG is ideally suited for interacting with maps. It’s fun stuff.

As for the slowness, I’m trying to see how to improve that further. Did you try one of the latest versions? (1.3 or 1.4) I removed some of the special effects by default on them, hoping to make it faster. Please let me know where the speed issue is most problematic.