Video Tutorial: Access Your Phone’s Camera With WAC Widgets

The Wholesale Applications Community, commonly referred to as WAC, has published specifications and an SDK to increase the functionality of mobile applications written in web languages. The WAC 1.0 specification contains APIs in categories such as:

  • PIM: for accessing contacts and calendar information
  • Multimedia: for accessing multi-media capabilities such as the camera
  • Device: for accessing information about the phone
  • Messaging: for sending SMS for example to access mobile devices


For Android users wishing to try out these capabilities, we recently released a WAC-1.0-compliant widget runtime for Android. To accompany this, we also looked after developers by providing an Opera Widget plugin for Eclipse and an early version of the Opera Widget Desktop Emulator with WAC 1.0 API support.

Following on from these releases, we’ve now created a video tutorial that shows how to make a simple WAC widget that can access a mobile device’s camera. In the screencast, we use Eclipse and the Opera Widget plugin to create a widget that takes photos and then run the widget from within the IDE.

And once you’ve watched that, don’t forget that we also have a written tutorial showing how to build a spirit level widget using WAC 1.0.