Articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]
-
Launching developer Q&A on Stack Overflow
One thing that is very important for us at Mozilla is the need to directly interact with you developers and help you with challenges and issues while developing using open technologies. We are now happy to announce our presence on Stack Overflow! Stack Overflow is one of – if not the – most well-known question […]
-
Songs of Diridum: Pushing the Web Audio API to Its Limits
When we at Goo Technologies heard that the Web Audio API would be supported in an upcoming version of Mozilla Firefox, we immediately started brainstorming about what we could build with that. We started discussing the project with the game developers behind “Legend of Diridum” (see below) and came up with the idea of a […]
-
Getting Started With HTML5 Game Development
There are plenty of valid ways to create an HTML5 game, and quite a bit of material on the technical aspect of each, so for this article I’ll be giving more of a broad overview of HTML5 game development. How “HTML5” can be better than native, where to start with the development process, where to […]
-
Building a Todo app for Firefox OS, part 1
This is the first part out of two in a tutorial series where we will build a Todo app for Firefox OS from scratch. I assume you have some understanding of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery/Zepto, and Backbone.js. In this part we will handcraft a properly structured and semantic UI of a Todo app using best […]
-
Single Div Drawings with CSS
Why A Single Div? In May of 2013 I attended CSSConf and saw Lea Verou speak about the humble border-radius. It was an eye-opening talk and I realized there was much about CSS behavior I did not fully understand. This reminded me of my time as a fine arts student where I was constantly pushed […]
-
Toolbox, Inspector & Scratchpad improvements – Firefox Developer Tools Episode 32
Firefox 32 was just uplifted to the Aurora release channel, so let’s take a look at the most important Developer Tools changes in this release. First, we would like to thank all 41 people who contributed patches to DevTools this release! Here is a list of all DevTools bugs resolved for Firefox 32. Toolbox We’ll […]
-
Testing Your Native Android App
It’s an interesting time to be a web developer! For years Apps have been eating the web and now we are seeing the Web eat the OS. Mozilla is pushing for a world where you can write standards-based, Open Web Apps. These apps should install as native apps and just work, regardless of the platform. […]
-
The Gamepad API
I’ve been fascinated by video games since I was a kid. From the Atari and Colecovision to the NES and Super NES, I’ve spent countless hours playing a variety of games. While my own video game playing has tapered off, I’m still interested in the issues and advancements surrounding gaming. I’ve watched the recent popularity […]
-
Implementing In-App Payments in Your Firefox OS App
At Mozilla, we have been working on bringing payments to the web. We think it is important that developers have an easy way to monetize their apps. It also gives us the chance to offer deeper platform integration, allowing things like carrier billing in addition to credit/debit cards. We’ve talked about in-app payments before in […]
-
Live editing WebGL shaders with Firefox Developer Tools
If you’ve seen Epic Games’ HTML5 port of ‘Epic Citadel’, you have no doubt been impressed by the amazing performance and level of detail. A lot of the code that creates the cool visual effects you see on screen are written as shaders linked together in programs – these are specialized programs that are evaluated […]