Firefox Talk and Hackday in Málaga

Last 19th of March, I went to Málaga to talk about Mozilla, FirefoxOS and the web with my colleague from Mozilla Hispano David Bengoa (who is from Málaga, but it’s in UK with an Erasmus).

In the morning, we had the talk where we explained what is Mozilla, our values, what we have done in the past, and what are we doing right know, with emphasis in the history of Internet browsers and how we can achieve a 30% of marketshare thanks to the awesome work of thousands of contributors.

Also, we shown different projects Mozilla has, like FirefoxOS, all about Labs (with asm.js and new JavaScript features) and more stuff, like WebAPIs, presented by David.

And, of course, we gave some swag!! 😀

And in the evening we had a 2 hours hack with people that mostly did not know about HTML5 or JavaScript, so we did a quick and small demo on the capabilities of the web friends and show some demos about it.

It was fun!

Test your Gaia localization

Requirements

You need some tools on your machine (tested on MacOS and GNU/Linux, not yet on Windows – feedback appreciated).

Git
Python 2.6
adb (from Android SDK)

Clone Gaia

  $ git clone https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia.git
  $ cd gaia

Clone locales

You need to clone all locales that you want to have in the device (and set those in the languages.json from the next step).

  $ cd locales
  $ hg clone URL

where the URL depends on what are you trying on:

v1.0.1: http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/gaia-l10n/v1_0_1/$LANG/
v1-train or master: https://hg.mozilla.org/gaia-l10n/$LANG/

v1.0.1 is the first version («es», «pr-BR» and «en-US») and you should work on v1-train or even master.

Set environment variables

You need to export the following variables. You can do that on your .bashrc file or even on the build time (before the command).

  export LOCALE_BASEDIR=/path/to/gaia/locales/
  export LOCALES_FILE=/path/to/gaia/shared/resources/languages.json

where languages.json must be edited to select what locales you want to test. For example:

{
  "ca" : "Catalan",
  "en-US" : "English (US)",
  "es" : "Español",
  "eu" : "Euskara",
  "gl" : "Galego"
}

Build and flash

Go to the gaia cloned folder, and just:

  $ make reset-gaia

if you want to test on your device (and you have it connected) or

  $ make profile

if you want to use it with your b2g-desktop build from here.

You can also put the environment variables before the launch of the make like:

  $ LOCALE_BASEDIR=/path/to/gaia/locales/ LOCALES_FILE=/path/to/gaia/shared/resources/languages-all.json make reset-gaia

Test

Once finished, you will have a new Gaia build on your phone with the languages you just flahsed. Or you can use your b2g-18 binary to run it on desktop, with:

 # Profile Ready: please run [b2g|firefox] -profile /Users/willyaranda/projects/gaia-mozilla/profile
 $ /path/to/b2g-19/binary -profile /path/from/above/output

And that’s it. Enjoy your new gaia in your language!

Dogfood your Geeksphone Keon or Peak

What a nice hardware for the first phones with FirefoxOS!

I just got a Geeksphone Keon (the little kid) and a Geeksphone Peak (the teenager) and there are some things I need to have on my phones to consider them real, like Twitter, Facebook, a Chat app and my Google Contacts.

Twitter

If you like microblogging as I do, you need to install this app. Just go to the marketplace and install it. It lacks HTML5 offline cache to be really fast (it’s a really bad UX to open the app and wait for 10 seconds to start see something on the screen…), but it’s a first good step. Lacks desktop notifications…

Desktop notifications in HTML5

In JavaScript:

var not = navigator.mozNotification.createNotification('New mention from @willyaranda', 'This is shown on the Desktop!', null);

not.show();

Facebook

Again, this is on the marketplace. It’s the mobile version of their portal, so the same as m.facebook.com. Works as expected. Lacks desktop notifications, that could be really useful (new message, new wall post…)

Chat app

We have some kind of apps for chatting, but nothing final. I am waiting for a Spanish company which will be releasing LOQUI, that will be the chat killer app for smartphones!

Google Contacts

If you have syncronization enabled on your Android and like Google services, you probably have all contacts in the cloud… And you can add them to your FirefoxOS phone!

So with this app, created by the awesome Francisco Jordano (@mepartocontigo) from O₂, you will be able to download your Google Contacts and add (with picture!) to your FirefoxOS phone. What else do you need? 😀

But the app is not yet on the Marketplace, but you can use it right now! What are the steps?

Clone or download (and unzip) the project on Github
Install the FirefoxOS Simulator on your Firefox from this page. Choose your correct platform!
Once installed, go to Firefox -> Tools -> Web developer -> FirefoxOS Simulator
On your FirefoxOS phone, go to Settings > Information > More information > Developer and enable «Remote debugging»