The blue slot light on my Wii was flashing this morning … I turned it on, checked the message board with excitement … and … all that was waiting was another Wii system update. This is the second system update pushed out by Nintendo in about a week, hot on the heels of the recent Wii system update to version 3.0.

According to Nintendo, no real new features here, but they claim to have fixed problems with LAN adapters that they broke in the upgrade to version 3.0, and have fixed ‘hangs’ in the Internet Channel.

I always find the Internet Channel cannot play Flash videos longer than about 10 mins .. I wonder if this update fixes it ? Or does it fix the Flash player ‘crash’ bug uncovered by Symantec, that some have speculated could be exploited for running homebrew Wii software ?

I hope this will not become a recurring pattern of “ship update, break (or worse brick) some Wii’s, ship update for the broken update”.

Let’s face it: YouTube is uber cool, but it sort of sucks when viewed using the Wii Internet Channel. Zoom in, zoom out .. switch fullscreen …wait … wait some more. And I can never hit that pokey little Pause button with the Wiimote pointer. TV isn’t supposed to be too interactive, and when I’m vegging out on the couch I don’t want to have to mess around with all that just to view each short video comfortably.

Enter Moowee.tv and StumbleVideo; two YouTube-powered video sites that specifically optimise their pages for viewing on the Wii.

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Here are some general guidelines which should keep in mind to ensure your WordPress temples display properly in the Opera browser on the Nintendo Wii. Much of this applies to any web page designed for the Wii Internet Channel.

1. Test your site in Opera 9. The Internet Channel on the Wii is based on Opera 9, so testing in Opera 9 is a great start to finding potential compatibility issues. Ultimately, you really need to view the page on the Wii using a TV to check that is it legible.
2. The maximum page width is 800 pixels wide, but keeping image and CSS element widths well under this is advised (the Wii shop channel looks good, and is 608×456). This should mean that the user doesn’t have to scroll sideways or zoom out to see the layout as intended.
3. JPEG, GIF, PNG (with alpha transparency), BMP, ICO, SVG 1.1 basic, and scripted canvas are supported.
4. Only Flash 7 is supported, and most Javascript is okay (no Java or other plugins are available)
5. Opera on Wii uses only two fonts: a sans-serif font “Wii NTLG PGothic” and a monospace font called “Wii NTLG Gothic”. Keeping the font size to a minimum of 14 – 16px should ensure that the fonts are legible on a TV without requiring the user to zoom in.

I was planning on customising a Wordpress template to detect if the browser has the User-Agent for the Wii Opera browser (Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1038-58; Wii Shop Channel/1.0; en)), and display a custom css stylesheet accordingly. Turns out, this has already been done with the WordPress Wii Edition Plugin (WiiPress v1.3) !! I’ll probably tweak it a little in the future, but it works well enough to use “out of the box” !!

(For Firefox users who wanting to see this site using the stylesheets designed for the Wii, install the Switch User Agent Add-on and add the User-Agent “Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1038-58; Wii Shop Channel/1.0; en)”, then reload this site).

Here are some links with general guidance to make pages display better on the Wii:

• Making Wii-friendly Pages (opera.com)
• WordPress Wii Edition Plugin (WiiPress v1.3)
• Web design guide for Opera Browser on Wii
• Is your site ready for Wii ?
• Wii press kit images … nice graphics for Wii-based themes (like the theme of this blog, for instance).