Two of the keynotes were especially memorable. The keynote by Catherine Bracy, Director of Community Organizing for Code for America, left me feeling fortunate indeed to be involved with our local Code for NOVA brigade. Catherine laid out in clear terms Code for America's vision of transforming the way citizens relate to their government (and the increasing alienation many feel from government) by bringing the community together to work collaboratively to address local needs.
The keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss discussed how sexism and the myth of the rock star / ninja programmer where keeping people from entering the programming field and driving women out of it after they do enter. By describing the ninja programmer myth as an inverted normal distribution, he presented both a memorable image and a clear exposure of the absurdity of the myth.
Lowering barriers to entry into programming is my raison d'être as an ICT/CS teacher in a school serving lower income, immigrant students. If I can't find a way to lower the barrier to entry, there is really no good reason for me to come to work each day. It is with that in mind that I have been continuously thrilled by the wonderful work the folks at Mozilla are doing with their development tools for Firefox OS.
The following three files are from the first app introduced in chapter 2 of Firefox OS in Action:
Here is what this code looks like running in a browser (with the widow suitably shrunk to a small size):
The following three files are from the first app introduced in chapter 2 of Firefox OS in Action:
Here is what this code looks like running in a browser (with the widow suitably shrunk to a small size):
adding one more file turns this into a Firefox OS app:
Here is the app loaded in the WebIDE and running in the simulator:
The deployment story here is simply amazing. I've never seen anything like it. The WebIDE comes with Firefox, so there is nothing to install. Simply press <Cntrl>+<F8> to launch it. A few clicks of the mouse and a simulator with your choice of version of Firefox OS is running, and deploying your app to the simulator is a matter of loading the app source into the WebIDE and clicking a single button!
It can't get any better than that, right? Wrong! The best is yet to come. What if you want to deploy your app to a real phone?
To show you how amazingly simple this is, let me first introduce a more interesting app, the LibriFox audio book player that two of my students are working on:
To deploy this app to my Firefox OS phone, I simply plug in the phone with the USB cable, and it now shows up in the list of available targets:
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| Firefox OS(Flame) is my phone |
Clicking the same triangle button I used to deploy to the simulator loads the app onto my phone. Wow!
I've never seen a development environment that even approaches the simplicity and elegance of this one. The Mozilla Foundation is delivering on its goal of "making the Web better and more accessible for everyone everywhere". I'm an ICT teacher just getting started in mobile app development, but I'm hooked on Firefox OS already. By lowering the barrier to entry into this important technology, Mozilla will surely attract new developers far and wide, promising great things for the future of this free software phone operating system.
Thank you, Mozilla!
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