“Still, Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to ensure that mobile websites will continue to be relevant even as developers create hundreds of thousands of proprietary apps. Firefox could lose the battle for the smartphone OS market but still win the war for open standards.”
For example, the list of time zones is a disorganized mess, with some cities listed by country (“Argentina/Buenos Aires”) others listed by state (“Indiana/Winamac”), and still others listed alone (“New York”). Strangely, several major cities on the East Coast, including Baltimore, Washington, and my own city of Philadelphia, didn’t make the cut (Denver, Detroit, and Chicago are on the list). So I had to pick “New York” as my time zone.
That’s pretty standard time zone selection information for any Linux or *BSD.
Edited 2013-03-28 12:55 UTC
It does sound like the standard linux time zone selection screen. To be honest, I hate that selection screen! If I didn’t already know that Chicago is in Central Time Zone, I wouldn’t know which one to pick, considering Chicago is nearly 1000 miles away from me here in Texas!
Yeah, what the hell happened to the simple Time zone info database we had about ten years ago? In that one I could pick “US/Eastern” or “US/Pacific.” You actually can still do this as these files do exist, but you have to symlink /etc/localtime manually which won’t really work with Firefox OS. Who’s dumb ass idea was that anyway? It’s not like every damn city has its own time zone, and most of those files are just duplicates for god’s sake.
> It’s not like every damn city has its own time zone,
Many of them do. The reason there are all those mentions of Indiana is that Indiana doesn’t follow standard time zone behavior, so there are three time zones at work depending on where you are in the state. Roughly the eastern third is on eastern time, the western third is on central time, and the middle third stays on eastern standard time all year. The entire state of Arizona stays on mountain standard time all year because daylight is not really something you want to maximize in the Sonoran desert.
Regarding Arizona: The Navajo territories in the northeastern part of the state do follow Daylight Saving Time, so for part of the year they are on a different clock than the rest of Arizona.
been at gdc, talked to a lot of people.
developer interest for anything not ios or android is unexistent. Pretty much no one cares about WP8 at all and much less the new blackberry phones. So why would it be different for a phone that is even harder to develop for?
I love JS, web technologies and high level languages in general, I’ll probably do it just for the fun of it.
I personally think this is an important part of FirefoxOS, a quote from the article:
“In this sense, Firefox OS is as much a project to improve the Web as it is a project to build a new mobile operating system. Every Firefox OS API Mozilla can get adopted by other major browsers makes it easier for developers to convert vanilla Web apps into “native” Firefox OS apps, and vice versa. Even if Mozilla’s OS never gains significant market share, the effort to flesh out a complete set of Web standards for mobile computing will help to push the Web forward.”
And it helps webapps on the desktop as much as on mobile.
Game devs dont’t care much about mobile web. You can be sure developer/publisher community at large does.
I would say this in another way, game developers don’t care about open source, it is all about getting the idea out of the door, no matter with what tooling.
Back in the day I still had any chance to jump into the industry (too old now for that), I lost significant development time trying to preach OOS instead of just focusing in the game development per se.
I do think that mozilla is doomed with firefox os.
However, their argument on apps kind of makes sense: its HTML 5. You write it once and it will work every where*!
* Everywhere that has included the new HTML 5 features we invented.
I think the review kind of speaks volumes, Mozilla can make the base apps great, but the third party apps kind of stink due to the hosting being unreliable. With Ios and android there is a limit to how bad an application can be, with firefox it doesn’t look like there will be a limit.
Those aren’t proper apps, per se. They’re not much more than IFRAMEs pointed at mobile sites.
Proper apps can use AppCache to store the entire UI in the phone and then just XMLHttpRequest or WebSocket data back and forth.
For the point I was making, It doesn’t matter weather you consider them “proper” or not. The apps are there, and they’re not very good.
My point is that they’re nothing new. Attacking Firefox OS for having them without attacking iOS or Android developers who just put a WebKit frame in an app bundle is disingenuous at best.
Ah, that is a good point. I think though its a distinction that’s easily lost when firefox os advertizes its apps as being “HTML 5”. If you write a crappy web container app in ios or Android, people will tell you to write a native app instead. Its a bit more confusing with firefox, it will end up sounding like “don’t write a html5 app, write an html 5 app!”.
*nod* A pain indeed but, hopefully, we can reorient the focus on “Write an offline-ready HTML5 app” or “Write an AppCache-enabled HTML5 app”.
Yeah, the problem is which version of HTML5.
One got to love standards.
Phones aren’t really game consoles.
Actually even since Snake on the Nokia 7210 back in 1998/9 (it used to be a bit of a craze back in then to see who could get the highest score) … people have been playing games on their phones.
You may scoff but people always been into mobile gaming.
Why do people keep looking at these things with the US/western hat on.
These phones are meant for other markets, where smartphones have not yet made any big impact.
Usually because they are much to expensive.
i’m not sure such markets exist.
not in latin america or asia as far as i know.. maybe you mean like.. in central africa?
The US/Western Hat is the only one I’m really comfortable wearing. The only reason why I’d buy a phone or recommend it to a friend is if it met our needs. So yes, I could preface ever comment I ever make about anything with “From a US/Western perspective”, but isn’t that obvious? I mean should I expand that to ” From the third planet of the known solar system in the milky way galaxy’s western/US perspective, ” ?
At some point in time interest for Android and iOS was pretty slim too.
Yeah, before they were invented
LOL
I’d take anytime C++, Java or C# over HTML5/JS for mobile devices or desktop development.
Not only HTML5/JS it’s a misfit for mobile apps, but performance will be going to suck.
I don’t know why Windows 8, Tizen and Firefox OS tries to recycle web designers into programmers. Maybe it’s trendy?
Well, I can tell you my personal perspective. I started as a low level programmer – ASM, C and all that stuff, but in time I realized that I tended to focus too much on the implementation of my ideas instead of my ideas – which, I can’t lie, at the time, was a pleasure in itself. But as time went by, I realized that I wanted more to make my ideas come to life, than to get lost in the implementation. That’s when I went into web development – you could just sit down and program and not think that much about implementation details and language constraints.
Unfortunately, I’ve always yearned to get back to app development, but until Python I haven’t found anything compatible with the way I wanted to do things. But, I didn’t have the time or the disposition to learn more than a crust of Python and I still couldn’t get back to doing what I loved.
That is, until recently. And to my surprise instead of Mohammed going to the mountain, the mountain is coming to Mohammed. JS is slowly but surely becoming an application language. I couldn’t be more excited.
Until Javascript is treated as a firts-class native system language, COMPILED to bare machine code, the performance-heavy applications (read: games) will always suck compared to platforms which allow that.
If it will not be the case, it would mean MORE CORES, MOAR RAM to run things that could be ran with half the power, if they were compiled to machine code.
Well, the modern JavaScript engines are quite a bit faster relative to native machine code than Dalvik was before it got a JIT. And, last I checked, Dalvik was still mediocre when compared to well-optimized, natively complied c/c++ code. So, yeah. You aren’t going to get native performance from V8 or any other modern JS engine… but is it bad enough to make it unviable? I doubt it.
And asm.js may help too.
No, but Javascript is bad enough even if you leave the performance issues aside. It doesn’t scale well to large projects.
This is why people use stupid XX to JS compilers, because writing in JS is a royal pain.
Writing JS is a royal pain if you don’t understand it. The problem is that especially those who come from Java, C# and C++ backgrounds is that you can achieve the same thing multiple different ways.
Just look at creating namespace, there are at least 5 different patterns.
I find the mental overhead of switching from C# to JavaScript quite difficult, most just don’t bother.
Edited 2013-03-29 18:41 UTC
I can’t wait to have a single platform to develop for – give me my MOFOS!
they are promoting an html5 devel environment for wiiu.
their booth at gdc was only about tha and shameful.
How is FFOS different from ChromeOS? Don’t they cater to the same developers? Shouldn’t the bulk of the code written for one of these systems work on the other (after all they’re “just” HTML5)? If there’s any hope for these, then there would be a convergence of the System level APIs so that the apps could be more portable across them, and then in to the browsers.
I don’t know why FFOS would have any less of a chance than ChromeOS, save for being a bit later to the game.
Local storage handling. Try using this site: http://www.filldisk.com on any browser and watch the increasing use of disk space in real time (make sure to not fall asleep otherwise your RAM will be easily filled up and make your system slow). Only Firefox including inside Firefox OS is immune of this hack.
Here is the details how it works: http://feross.org/fill-disk/
Edited 2013-03-29 18:45 UTC