Firefox OS Apps Days are coming... A series of events which will take place in ~20 locations around the world during the last week of January.
But...
...on Saturday we had a taste of what these events will be about, since we organized a small hackathon at Athens Hackerspace. Around 40 developers showed up, willing to learn about Mozilla's new effort to liberate the mobile ecosystem through Open Web Apps and Firefox OS and of course contribute to that cause.
Some observations and remarks from the event and the feedback we got:
- Most of the attendees already knew their way around web technologies and they realized why using them for mobile apps makes sense
- Many people don't know that web apps are functional on Android today (or even Desktop) and really get impressed when they find out.
- Android developers got interested on using web as a platform.
- It seems that the 5h hacking session is not enough to create a super wow app, but enough time to have some prototypes and working code.
- Lack of thorough documentation on some WebAPIs and on WebActivities. We really need to improve that.
- We have to emphasize the fact that Firefox Marketplace is not just another mobile application ecosystem.
- A 20% of people tend to register for the event and not attending. Need to remember that when setting a cap on registration.
- The fact that we had several devices really helped during the hacking session for testing code.
- Firefox OS Simulator is awesome! It just needs support for touch events ;)
- Maybe some mini talks during the hacking session for minor subjects would be nice (eg. Manifest walk through, WebActivites, more info on some specific Web APIs, intro to responsive design principles, git basics).
So hold your breath people for the big event. It's less than 2 months away. Help us liberate the mobile ecosystem using open web technologies. The only requirement for participation will be just endless love for freedom and the web. Let's make history again in the same way we did with Firefox.