/Welcome to the 7th Edition
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Engagement/Developer_Engagement/DevPulse/Sept2014>
of DevPulse. You are receiving this email as a group of people
interested in and/or working closely with Developer Relations to support
app & web developers worldwide. This is sourced by many Mozillians who
support developers, highlighting happenings among web & app developers
with a goal of fostering greater points of collaboration to support
them. All editions are also posted on the DevPulse wiki page
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/Engagement/Developer_Engagement/DevPulse>./
Developer world news
*BrazilJS.* Mozilla participated in BrazilJS <http://mzl.la/1lM7yEO>
last month. Some highlights:
* 56 people attended the Mozilla meetup (we anticipated 20-30), and
everyone was actively engaged, using post-it notes to provide FxOS
and dev tools feedback.
* Nearly 120 people showed up for Game Night! Attendees engaged in
games that facilitated learning about dev tools, Mozilla culture,
and Firefox OS.
* Lots of love for our speakers Nick Desaulniers
<http://mzl.la/1pxKpRl>, Chris Mills <http://mzl.la/ChrisMills>,
Miller Medeiros <http://mzl.la/MM> and contributor Leo Balter
<http://mzl.la/LeoB> who spoke to what looked like a near-full
auditorium.
* We had almost 380,000 social media impressions! Conversation ranged
from fun photo sharing at the event to the spreading of messages
about Firefox OS, innovative Web technology, and promise.
* Finally, "Níveis dos Mananciais de SP" <http://mzl.la/1qCmJz4> was
one of 10 apps submitted at the event, showing the level of the
water reservoirs of São Paulo, which is undergoing a drought. It's a
great highlight of both local content and citizen empowerment.
*Cross-Broswer to-do list.* App developers may be interested in this
Smashing Magazine piece, Building a Simple Cross-Browser To-Do List with
IndexedDB and WebSQL <http://mzl.la/1xlTfvD>. Note that WebSQL is needed
only for iOS, and a polyfill is available so you don't have to think
about it.
*Standards sausagemaking.* Ever wondered how standards are made? Ever
wished you could influence the future of the web? You can. Here's the
story <http://mzl.la/1o7fWKq> of some developers who did.
App & Web Developer Perspectives
*Cross-Platform Tools Report.* Mozilla recently sponsored a survey
<http://mzl.la/YihfQP> asking 2,188 app developers to rate and assess
tools for cross-platform development. Some key findings (hat tip to
Sakina Groth <http://bit.ly/TVsvzv> for the summary):
* Most developers use multiple tools: 41% have used more than 3, but
also claim time needed to familiarize with a new tool as a barrier
* The top apps developed with cross-platform tools ("CPT") are games
(37%), enterprise apps (25%) & business apps (23%)
* The top 5 platforms supported by these tools are iOS, Android, WP8,
Blackberry 10, HTML5, with WP8 as the platform which tops the wish
list of cross-platform tool users
* Developers have realized a 50+% time savings with CPT, and are
mainly used for shorter app projects (usually under 3 months)
* 81% of developers claim that the quality of the apps developed with
cross-platform tools is as good as or even better than apps
developed with a native IDE
* The major market barrier for CPT vendors is low awareness of their
tools: Only 16 cross-platform tools are known to 20% of the global
app developer community. The remaining 150+ tools is hardly known or
unknown.
* Before implementing APIs for Firefox OS into their tools, the
majority of cross-platform tool vendors want a clear signal that
handsets have reached mass market shipments
*If you build it they probably won't come.* Research has shown that most
do not consider marketing as part of their app development journey - but
there is a clear correlation between those that do and the success of
their app. The "Developer Marketing Series" on the Marketplace Apps blog
are short posts intended to provide app developers with marketing best
practices, tips and tricks. The latest post <http://mzl.la/1vbr6CE>
addresses social media marketing.
*Open Web Apps feedback channel launches.* We have just launched
<http://mzl.la/1tm25nT> the feedback channel <http://mzl.la/openwebapps>
for Open Web Apps! Instead of endless discussions with developers about
web vs. native, "web apps don't have what I need for my app," developers
can give specific input and ideas on how to make it better.
For the period of Aug 4 - Sept 2, the new channel received 1,102 unique
visitors and generated 44 new ideas, to which all are being responded.
Big kudos to the WebAPI team (Andrew Overholt <http://mzl.la/AndrewO> &
more), Partner Engineering (Harald Kirschner & [http://mzl.la/NickD Nick
Desaulniers <http://mzl.la/HaraldK>) and Evangelism (Robert Nyman
<http://mzl.la/RobertN>) for moderating this important channel.
Of course, the DevTools channel <http://mzl.la/devtools> launched
earlier this year. Last month this channel got 1,121 Unique visitors (up
from 712 over the previous period). This is another highly-engaged group
of visitors, introducing 54 new ideas (up from 20 raised in the previous
period).
*New on MDN.* A pragmatic guide for app developers: Installable apps for
FirefoxOS <http://mzl.la/1A680ii> h/t to @chrisdavidmills
<http://mzl.la/ChrisMills>.
Project & Event Highlights
*App tools aka Rec Room.*Rec Room <http://mzl.la/RecRoom> is a Node.js
utility that suggests which tools to use to build client side Web apps.
Read the Hacks post <http://mzl.la/HacksRR> to see how a Mozilla
engineer (aka Tofumatt <http://mzl.la/TofuMatt>) used Rec Room to build
and deploy a simple world clock web app.
*Onoarding your Flame phone.* Do you want to use a phone that has
adjustable RAM to simulate different performances across devices? Learn
how to set up a Flame reference device <http://mzl.la/Flame> for app
development, flash new builds, and change its RAM configurations in
these videos <http://mzl.la/FlameHacks>.
*Recent keynotes.* Christian Heilmann <http://mzl.la/ChrisH> gave the
closing keynote at Copenhagen's Coldfront conference
<http://mzl.la/Coldfront>. In the talk <http://mzl.la/1lMbHsk>,
Christian addresses <http://mzl.la/1pxSu8D> the need to simplify
development approaches to help improve browsers.
Christian aka Chris also gave the opening keynote and a session on
Firefox OS at the MobileTechCon <http://mzl.la/ZaXCKD>, drawing from
Comscore research to remind the audience that native platforms face the
same issues as the web (fragmentation, declining app download numbers),
butt the web can deliver to all platforms instead of one.
"Geekery" Highlights
*MDN Milestone.* For the first time ever, MDN <http://mzl.la/MDN> got
over 2.5M unique visitors in August. To put that in perspective, last
August we had 1.48M, so that's a 69% increase year-over-year! The
month-over-month numbers from August:
* Unique visitors: 2,590,310 up 21.80%
* Total number of visits: 4,878,129, down 1.02%
* Page views: 8,762,620 down 1.59%
On Monday, August 18 we had an especially sharp spike of 25% more
sessions compared to the previous week.
*Mo' Milestones.* Remember that July was the first month that Developer
Relations reached its 2014 goal of 1,000 active contributors (1,087 to
be exact). We maintained the pace in August with another 18% increase in
MDN editors (838 total), bringing us up to 1,105 active contributors
last month! If you want to go crazy, you can see these and more
up-to-date numbers in our DevRel Metrics spreadsheet
<http://mzl.la/DevRelMetrics>.
Engaging with Developers Together
* The Web Runtime project builds the runtimes for Android and the
desktop and ships them with every copy of Firefox. And they are
hiring engineers <http://mzl.la/RTEng>!
* Share and participate in the Open Web Apps
<http://mzl.la/openwebapps> forum!
* Help Tofumatt <http://mzl.la/TofuMatt> make his "High Fidelity"
<http://mzl.la/1nASfu3> app perform better on Firefox OS (e.g.
suggest things like fixes for memory/CPU usage to UX-related
<http://mzl.la/1BgG1Pk> input <http://mzl.la/1nASnK4>. Why? "I want
to take these fixes and push them back into rec room
<http://mzl.la/RecRoom> so developers with more complex needs can
write apps for Firefox OS that perform well." Sounds like a good
reason to us!
* Contribute to Firefox Marketplace, whether via quick "one and done"
tasks or larger 'guided' projects requiring ongoing mentorship.
Learn more on the wiki <http://mzl.la/YilxI0>, or join the next
'open chat' session in the #marketplace IRC room.
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