Mobile Articles
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The Missing SDK For Hybrid App Development
Hybrid vs. native: The debate has gone on, and will go on, for ages. Each form of app development has its pros and cons, and an examination of the key differences between the two methods reveals that a flat correlation is like comparing apples to oranges. Many hybrid app developers understand that they’re not starting […]
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Building Firefox Hub Add-ons for Firefox for Android
The Firefox Hub APIs allow add-ons to add new panels to the Firefox for Android home page, where users normally find their top sites, bookmarks and history. These APIs were introduced in Firefox 30, but there are more features and bug fixes in Firefox 31 and 32. You can already find some of these add-ons […]
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Pre-orders start today for Flame, the Firefox OS developer phone
Update 2014-07-15: The pre-order period has ended and the Flame is now available as a standard order, with shipping in 7-10 days. The Firefox OS Flame reference device that we announced at end of February is now available for pre-order at everbuying.com for $170 including free shipping. Pre-order now. To standardize the design, development, and […]
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HTML out of the Browser
Amongst my friends, I’m known as something of a Star Wars nerd. My longtime nick has been cfjedimaster (a combination of two passions, the other being ColdFusion), I work in a room packed to the gills with Star Wars toys, and I’ve actually gotten inked up twice now with Star Wars tats. That being said, […]
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It's a wrap! "App Basics for FirefoxOS" is out and ready to get you started
A week ago we announced a series of video tutorials around creating HTML5 apps for Firefox OS. Now we released all the videos and you can watch the series in one go. Photo by Olliver Hallmann The series is aimed at web developers who want to build their first HTML5 application. Specifically it is meant […]
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Flambe Provides Support For Firefox OS
Flambe is a performant cross-platform open source game engine based on the Haxe programming language. Games are compiled to HTML5 or Flash and can be optimized for desktop or mobile browsers. The HTML5 Renderer uses WebGL, but provides fallback to the Canvas tag and functions nicely even on low-end phones. Flash Rendering uses Stage 3D […]
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Custom Elements for Custom Applications – Web Components with Mozilla's Brick and X-Tag
In this article, we will explore the use of Mozilla’s Brick and X-Tag libraries. First we’ll use Brick to rapidly prototype a simple application. Then, we’ll build a custom web component using X-Tag. The Technology Brick: Curated Web Components Brick is a set of modular, reusable UI components. The components are designed for adaptive, responsive […]
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Designing Web Apps For Multiple Devices
Before 2010, there were few devices on the Web other than smartphones and desktop/laptop computers. Developers could assume phone users had a small screen, low bandwidth and used a webapp for brief moments. Desktop users were assumed to have a large screen, high bandwidth and spend large amounts of time within an application. Designing a […]
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Who moved my geolocation?
One of the questions we often get when we are talking about Firefox OS is: “What about the GPS on some devices”? You may have noticed that on some devices, the GPS position is not quite accurate or can take a long time to report even when you are outside. Let me start by explaining […]
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User-Agent detection, history and checklist
History User-Agent: <something> is a string of characters sent by HTTP clients (browsers, bots, calendar applications, etc.) for each individual HTTP request to a server. The HTTP Protocol as defined in 1991 didn’t have this field, but the next version defined in 1992 added User-Agent in the HTTP requests headers. Its syntax was defined as […]