Workshop on Free Mobile Platforms

Event Name : Workshop on Free Mobile Platforms
Event (Reps Portal) : https://reps.mozilla.org/e/workshop-on-free-mobile-platforms/
Events Page : http://programs.icfoss.org/wfm/
Mozilla’s Representative Organizer : Anush (bmx)
Venue : Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala.

The two-day workshop on Free Mobile Platforms started on 11^th March 2014, with a inaugural speech by Mr. Ramani B, Executive Director, CDAC with informative data about the current mobile platforms. It was followed by Release of Indic Keyboard made by Swathanthra Malayalam Computing.

Indic keyboard is a free, native and open source Indian language input keyboard application for Android mobile devices.

This app extends Android’s default keyboard and adds support for languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu.

Firefox OS

The Indic keyboard launch was followed by a boot-up session on Firefox OS by Praveen Sridhar& Anush (bmx), covering all aspects of the OS. Starting up with the cause for Mozilla to start the new OS following up with how the OS advanced till date.

The session booted up enthusiasm in the audience about the new operating system.

We were well aware of the type audience we had from the beginning, with a little show-of-hands.

80% we web developers, so, we did made small changes in the sessions and went in a little deep to boost the adrenaline in the blood of the web developers.

To make it more interesting, the talk on Firefox OS concluded with a live hands-on demo of the Mozilla Labs and Appmaker; With that, the audience were very eager for the Appday that was planned for Day 2.

As planned, the 60-minute sessions concluded in 50 minutes, with 10 minutes for Q&A, some of the top questions that were posed are :

1. Is Firefox OS ready for daily use?
   Ans : Yes, we have been using Firefox OS as our primary smartphone operating systems for the past 6 months.
2. Does Firefox OS support games?
   Ans : Of course. We did a live demo of Cut the Rope.
3. What is the status about the new Firefox OS tablet and the 25$ Firefox OS smartphone?
   Ans : At present, we haven’t got any tablets for demo in our community, all we know about it is what we heard from the media. About the $25 smartphone, all we can say is that Mozilla is trying to break the minimum barrier of $50 for smartphones.

Along with these we did get a few questions regarding the back-end of the OS, how is it built, is it community driven, etc. were also discussed.

Sessions on Replicant, Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) and UbuntuTouch OS continued.

Day 2

With the right dose of adrenalin in their blood, the developer audience were all set to get their hands-on the HTML5-based Firefox OS. This was the first event this year for the Mozilla Keralacommunity with more than 80% developer back-end’ed audience.

The initial kick off session was done by Shine. We had a few new developers in the audience, so, a little brush up session on HTML & CSS was the strategic plan for the day. It was followed up by Praveen.

With lot of developers in the audience, psbots drove deeply into web APIs, giving a detailed view on the various APIs available in the OS and their applications using the <https://github.com/robnyman/Firefox-OS-Boilerplate-App” target=”_blank”>Firefox OS Boilerplate app. Anush (bmx) did a demo of building an app using a demo HTML5 Calculator app.

Within an hour, all the participants had made their first app for Firefox OS. That was a moment to remember for them, we had about 30+ minutes on the clock left for the lunch, so we deployed a mini-hack session to hack the calculator app made by Ideaviate to include a square root function. A couple of developers did achieve the task but that too wasn’t completely working so we had to stop with no winners.

The hackathon session continued after lunch where 3 apps were built with complete functionality, ready to be submitted to the Firefox OS Marketplace. Though we had more completed apps, they were not ready for submission to the Firefox OS Marketplace. We had the Geeksphone Peak and Keon for testing. 20+ apps were started and worked upon. We had some trouble uploading the files to the Firefox OS Marketplace, so, the participants were asked to upload the files after the event.

The workshop on Free Mobile Platforms was a huge success for Mozilla Kerala. We ended the day with a group photo click of the organizers and participants.