Book Image

Learning Firefox OS Application Development

By : Tanay Pant
Book Image

Learning Firefox OS Application Development

By: Tanay Pant

Overview of this book

With broad compatibility, the latest in web technologies, and powerful development tools, Firefox is a great choice for both web developers and end users. Firefox OS’s promotion of HTML5 as a first class citizen opens up the walled gardens of mobile application development for web developers. It is because of this initiative that no special SDKs are required to develop for Firefox OS. This book will help you excel in the art of developing applications for Firefox OS. It sequentially covers knowledge building, skills acquisition, and practical applications. Starting with an introduction to Firefox OS, usage of WebIDE, and then the application structure, this book introduces applications of increasing complexity with each chapter. An application that measures your tapping speed, a geolocation tagging application, and a photo editing and sharing application are the three applications that will be built from scratch. You will learn about topics such as the difference between various types of Firefox OS applications, application manifest files, offline apps, and designing principles for applications. You will also learn to test and submit the applications to the marketplace and finally maintain the repository of the Firefox OS application. By the end, you will be able to develop beautifully designed, fully-fledged, and rigorously tested Firefox OS applications and also share them at the Firefox OS Marketplace.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Firefox OS Application Development
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Avoiding UI blunders


There are some really common UI blunders that you should avoid making when coding the frontend of your application. Some of the commonly observed mistakes include developers do not realize that packaged apps do not have navigation options (back and forward buttons) like a regular web application opening in the Web browser.

Unless of course, you make them visible in the application by adding the following code to your manifest file.

"chrome" : { "navigation" : true }

This code runs your application in full screen and hides the status bar as well. Make sure that you have navigation controls in your application, preferably in the header so that your users do not get stuck in a page from where they cannot navigate to other locations in the application. The Firefox Marketplace will reject your application if things like this happen because Firefox OS devices do not have a back button.

Also, there are no zoom or search options in an app by default, since it's not opening in a...