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?

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



5. Connect your phone, and the Simulator will show a «Device connected» at the left
6. Click on the Push button.



7. The simulator will be open and the app installed. You can find on the homescreen. Open it. Follow the steps!

Protip: You can Control-R (Cmd+R on Mac) to refresh the app, that the simulator will package and push, and open again. So wonderful!

Happy dogfooding!