My experience with Firefox OS | Hacker News Reader

My experience with Firefox OS

thelab.o2.com

They need to do something to make the locally installed app experience a little nicer (for developers, I mean). The 2 manifest file thing is a bit awkward.

Agreed. This was very confusing and does not seem to be explained very well anywhere.

Site was down again. But read the content from the cache and it looks more of how to start developing on Firefox OS post than an user experience of the OS itself. Of course it does talk about the experience of developing a simple app, but doesn't give a view of the user experience. I wish it gave a comparison. Besides that the Firefox OS platform looks interesting and attractive given every web developer can be an app developer on Firefox Os.

If anyone is interested, I've posted some of my observations using the Peak https://gist.github.com/cheeaun/5517132

Thanks for this!

So how does this compare to Android/iOS dev experiences? Other JS+CSS+HTML developement?

It's really easy. As he said, the only real difference between a webpage and a FirefoxOS app is the manifest.

I made a small Pomodoro app (https://github.com/worldsproject/pomos) as a test for learning the Chrome Web Store and FirefoxOS markets.

Chrome disallows some things, in my case localStorage, and replaces it with their own alternative. While not major, I still had to make adjustments. I also had to define a window. Again, not minor, but these still keep it sufficiently different from a normal webpage.

Whereas with the firefox app, I just had to write a manifest, and it worked without any changes.

The Chrome store is a bit more refined though, it has better and more options for displaying promotional graphics, and looks better overall.

It is pretty much web development. My method is to shrink a browser down to mobile size and create something in HTML/CSS/JS as if you were creating it for a mobile browser. If it works as a web app, it should work as a FirefoxOS app.

You can download the FirefoxOS simulator as a Firefox add-on for free to have a play about with it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-os-si...

Seems to be down - anyone got a cache?

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

Thanks - looking at a fix now, won't be a moment

Sorry seems like the Amazon ELB isnt playing nicely. Working to fix.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com