Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
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Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
1–10 of 44 posts
Re: Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
#2Simple yet powerful
Re: Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
#3Hrm.. While I mostly blame Vodafone for this exploitable and weird offer, I question the idea of using this hack to advertise Fx for developers.
It's novel mostly because of the strange environment, not due to the couple of lines of code to implement the hack.
And finally, I have a hard time believing that you couldn't do something comparable with Tasker etc. - or with a tiny Android app of your own (but I haven't tried managing calls so far, I might be off).
Re: Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
#4I wonder if firefox purposely chose to adopt a developer-first strategy with its mobile OS, similar to Stripe. I know that this strategy works, at least somewhat, on me, as I recently needed a payment processor for a hackathon and, knowing nothing about payment processors and after some quick googling for the most developer friendly payment API, I went with Stripe. Though, it's probably going to be a lot tougher for Mozilla to use this strategy effectively in such a consumer facing product, especially when the mobile OS market is already so saturated with mature ecosystems.
Re: Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
#5Hrm.. While I mostly blame Vodafone for this exploitable and weird offer, I question the idea of using this hack to advertise Fx for developers. It's novel mostly because of the strange environment, not due to the couple of lines of code to implement the hack. And finally, I have a hard time believing that you couldn't do something comparable with Tasker etc. - or with a tiny Android app of your own (but I haven't tr…
Just the same as Emacs scripting and Eclipse plugins. You can do the same with both, but the initial friction of bootstrapping a Plugin Project, declaring this year's flavor of OperationDescriptorFactory, etc. discourages plugins for one-off tasks.
Actually, the last platform I've seen that was ad-hoc scripting friendly was Symbian with PyS60. Now if there was a Firefox phone with a decent camera...
Re: Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
#6I think one basic problem with Firefox OS being a "developer-first" thing is the devices it's being shipped on. Of course, a $33 phone is a very cool thing to be able to do.
But as a developer, a lot of my disposable income is going to be directed towards gadgets and a $33 phone is just a decade behind the types of phones I would actually use myself.
I think that to attract developers, Mozilla should aim to find a partner that will ship a current-generation phone with Firefox OS. Asking people to install it themselves on a Galaxy based on a slightly screwed-up wiki page isn't exactly what I want for my personal every-minute-of-the-day phone.
Re: Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
#7I think one basic problem with Firefox OS being a "developer-first" thing is the devices it's being shipped on. Of course, a $33 phone is a very cool thing to be able to do. But as a developer, a lot of my disposable income is going to be directed towards gadgets and a $33 phone is just a decade behind the types of phones I would actually use myself. I think that to attract developers, Mozilla should aim to find a pa…
But then those developers will develop for that new phone, creating a bunch of stuff that will not run on the older phones.
Since those older phones are Mozilla's target market it would be an odd choice to make.
It's a little bit like the WWW where people (rightly) develop on very powerful hardware but often (wrongly) fail to test on a range of normal hardware. (This is also ignoring the fact that stuff written for the WWW should not need testing because it should all be standards compliant etc).
Re: Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
#8I think one basic problem with Firefox OS being a "developer-first" thing is the devices it's being shipped on. Of course, a $33 phone is a very cool thing to be able to do. But as a developer, a lot of my disposable income is going to be directed towards gadgets and a $33 phone is just a decade behind the types of phones I would actually use myself. I think that to attract developers, Mozilla should aim to find a pa…
Note that the current developer/reference hardware is quite different from the $33 Spreadtrum/Intex phone launching in India. The "Flame" developer phone retails for US$170 (after shipping):
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Developer_pho...
That's still nowhere near the same spec class as a $400+ iPhone or Android flagship, but compared to the Spreadtrum device, the Flame has 8 times more RAM, more than double the screen resolution, better cameras, dual-core 1.2GHz CPU, and other goodies like NFC.
True high-end devices will come eventually. I agree that it will help a lot when there's a fully-supported high-end phone that can more easily replace iPhone or Android as a developer's personal phone.
Re: Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
#9Hrm.. While I mostly blame Vodafone for this exploitable and weird offer, I question the idea of using this hack to advertise Fx for developers. It's novel mostly because of the strange environment, not due to the couple of lines of code to implement the hack. And finally, I have a hard time believing that you couldn't do something comparable with Tasker etc. - or with a tiny Android app of your own (but I haven't tr…
Just the same as Emacs scripting and Eclipse plugins. You can do the same with both, but the initial friction of bootstrapping a Plugin Project, declaring this year's flavor of OperationDescriptorFactory, etc. discourages plugins for one-off tasks. Actually, the last platform I've seen that was ad-hoc scripting friendly was Symbian with PyS60. Now if there was a Firefox phone with a decent camera...
For Android there's QPython[1], it's fairly close to PyS60, in my experience.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hipipal.qp...
Re: Firefox OS is a developer's best friend
#10I think one basic problem with Firefox OS being a "developer-first" thing is the devices it's being shipped on. Of course, a $33 phone is a very cool thing to be able to do. But as a developer, a lot of my disposable income is going to be directed towards gadgets and a $33 phone is just a decade behind the types of phones I would actually use myself. I think that to attract developers, Mozilla should aim to find a pa…
But then those developers will develop for that new phone, creating a bunch of stuff that will not run on the older phones. Since those older phones are Mozilla's target market it would be an odd choice to make. It's a little bit like the WWW where people (rightly) develop on very powerful hardware but often (wrongly) fail to test on a range of normal hardware. (This is also ignoring the fact that stuff written for t…
From the phone specs : The RAM is adjustable from 256MB to 1GB, allowing you to replicate a variety of performance levels to test the OS and apps.