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.