Yesterday I wrote my first Firefox OS App.

For now it's called kbt2 and it's round timer that I can use to give kickboxing lessons.

After:

• a few very frustrating hours dealing with the unintuitive and sometimes even failing Everlast Round Timer
• knowing that I could not use my own phone as it will be playing music during kickboxing sessions
• having a spare Firefox Developer Preview Phone thanks to a lucky raffle on Decode Friday
• knowing that building Firefox OS apps is as easy as creating a HTML site with some json for app definition and JS for making it e.g. vibrate when the timer is done

I decided to use my geekphone as a dedicated interval timer / instruction guide to help give kickboxing training using this app.

It's an offline app so I don't require any reception inside the gym.

Hacked this up on a rainy Sunday afternoon thanks to a headstart with:

• Great docs on the Mozilla Developer Network
• Firefox OS Boilerplate App which bundles some common code
• Firefox OS Simulator 4.0 which let me test & refresh with just 1 click

This project is very specific to my use-case but open sourced for inspiration and so that I can more easily install it :)

The Firefox Phone is targetted at upcoming markets so feature-wise it can't really compete - and wont't replace - your modernday iOS/Android device. However, at just 50$ you get a ton of easy-programmable hardware (cpu, ram, touchscreen, wifi, usb, etc), which opens up possibilites for all kinds of dedicated applications.