Articles by Robert Nyman [Editor emeritus]
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Building a persistent Notes app for Firefox OS
In this tutorial we will be building a notes app (like Evernote) from scratch and deploy it to Firefox OS! See a live demo. A persistent notes app needs a place to store all the notes for a user (so no one else can read it). For this we will use my own backend solution […]
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Box model highlighter, Web Console improvements, Firefox OS HUD + more – Firefox Developer Tools Episode 30
Firefox 30 was just uplifted to the Aurora release channel, so let’s take a look at the most important DevTools changes in this release. Inspector One of our most requested features has been to highlight box model regions of elements on the page. We are happy to report that this feature has landed in Firefox […]
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Better integration for open web apps on Android
Up until now, developing web apps on mobile has been a little tricky. After spending the time developing your app, getting your users to install it is difficult, especially when the concept of “installing a web app” is not very well defined. The most popular method is synonymous with adding a shortcut to the homescreen. […]
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jsDelivr – The advanced open source public CDN
This is a guest post by Dmitriy Akulov and his project jsDelivr. – Editor’s note. As a developer you are probably aware of Google Hosted Libraries. Google offers an easy and fast way to include 12 of the most popular js libraries in your websites. But what if you are a webmaster and you want […]
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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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Lessons learnt building ViziCities
Just over 2 weeks ago Peter Smart and Robin Hawkes released the first version of ViziCities to the world. It’s free to use and open-sourced under an MIT license. In this post I will talk to you about the lessons learnt during the development of ViziCities. From application architecture to fine-detailed WebGL rendering improvements, we […]
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The Making of the Time Out Firefox OS app
A rash start into adventure So we told our client that yes, of course, we would do their Firefox OS app. We didn’t know much about FFOS at the time. But, hey, we had just completed refactoring their native iOS and Android apps. Web applications were our core business all along. So what was to […]
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Ember.JS – What it is and why we need to care about it
This is a guest post by Sourav Lahoti and his thoughts about Ember.js Developers increasingly turn to client-side frameworks to simplify development, and there’s a big need for good ones in this area. We see a lot of players in this field, but for lots of functionality and moving parts, very few stand out in […]
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Live Editing Sass and Less in the Firefox Developer Tools
Sass and Less are expressive languages that compile into CSS. If you’re using Sass or Less to generate your CSS, you might want to debug the source that you authored and not the generated CSS. Luckily you can now do this in the Firefox 29 developer tools using source maps. The Firefox developer tools use […]
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HTML5, CSS3, and the Bookmarklet that Shook the Web
On Valentine’s Day last year we released a bookmarklet that went viral riding the popularity of the Harlem Shake meme. On the anniversary of its release we’d like to take a moment look back at the technical nuts and bolts of the bookmarklet as a case study in applying HTML5. In fact, the HTML, JavaScript, […]