Firefox WebApps

With Firefox OS, Mozilla brought a fresh concept to the smartphone market: applications for it were written with plain web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). This caught my interest, so in the summer of 2013 I built four small apps to get to know the possibilities and the limits of the new platform.

• Csatlakozó Tudakozó is a travel helper that tells you the mains voltage, frequency and plug types of 230 countries, with photos, so you find out about the missing adapter before it is too late.
• Elsősegély lépésről lépésre walks you through the most common first aid emergencies step by step with 38 pictures; its instructions were checked with an emergency doctor during development. It is a simplified version of my MPA app.
• Név-nap-tár looks up Hungarian name days by name or by date from a database of 1800 names and 5100 name days.
• Zászló Totó is a 13+1 question quiz where you guess which country a flag belongs to, drawing from the flags of nearly 200 countries.

The apps are built on the jQuery Mobile framework with custom JavaScript for the interactivity and custom CSS on top of the framework’s styling. All four were published to the Firefox Marketplace, which also meant going through the whole publishing process, including writing a web app manifest for each. I entered all of them into the application contest that Telenor Hungary announced for the debut of Firefox OS in 2013. The jury picked two of my apps, the first aid guide and the name day calendar, for the Telenor selection on the Firefox Marketplace, and the first aid guide was also included in the Marketplace’s Apps for Hungary collection.