The roads I take...

Im Rahmen der Linuxwochen Wien (Infos zum Veranstaltungsort sind auf deren Seiten verfügbar) findet am 4. Mai 2013 von 10 bis 15 Uhr ein Firefox OS App Workshop statt.

Gemeinsam mit zwei Kollegen aus München werden wir dort nach einer Einführung in Firefox OS und Open Web Apps direkt in die Materie starten und an unseren/euren eigenen Apps basteln - ganz gleich, ob ihr von einer bloßen Idee oder einer schon existenten Web-Anwendung startet.

Ihr könnt euch ab jetzt anmelden!

Weitere Informationen und Anmeldungs-Link auf der Linuxwochen-Seite!

I just split my Lantea Maps web app out of my main git repo and into its own small one, one main reason being that I can place it on GitHub as well. This is not meaning that I suddenly love the GitHub site, but having the repo there lowers the entry barrier for potential contributors and I'd be very happy to have people help me with this app.

Lantea Maps is a prototype web app to display maps and record (GPS) tracks, and I found it works pretty well with Firefox OS, actually. It's one of the apps I keep installing on my test device for that system, of course from its Mozilla Marketplace listing.

The app is based on a canvas that displays a map (from OpenStreetMap, multiple styles can be selected) and on which the recorded GPS tracks are displayed. The start of the app is there and working, but it could need quite some improvement - like making zoom switches and probably map panning smoother by using some canvas magic, supporting pinch gestures, caching tiles not just during a session but also across sessions (using IndexedDB), and more.

As mentioned on the original Lantea idea wiki page, there's a quite nice app for the Nokia N900 called Mappero that is a good source for feature and UI ideas, for me it's one the the best apps in that space and I'd love to have something similar to it as a web app - which is basically why I started Lantea at all.

That said, I'm open for all kinds of ideas for it - and even more, to patches and pull requests!