The roads I take...

At Mozilla, as well as a lot of other Free / Open Source Software projects, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is the backbone of real-time communication within the project.

The beauty of this chat service is that it's a really simple and lightweight protocol and there's a ton of different clients to access it, including for example ChatZilla, which is written completely in JavaScript, and multiple web-based clients. The latter would make nice Firefox OS apps, one might think, but their major downsides are that they are all running on the server-side and not really on the device you installed the app in - and their UI doesn't really fit the phone form factor.

Now, what I'd really like to see, though, is an app that runs locally on the Firefox OS device in its entirety, and which has a UI that is useful and nice on a phone. Especially the latter might mean not implementing all the fancy functionality that many IRC clients have, but only those parts required for some simple chatting.

We have the technology to run a full IRC client on a Firefox OS phone with the TCPSocket API, and the simplicity of the IRC protocol would make it a nice reason for someone who wants to play with this API.

The UI, OTOH, would make a very interesting challenge for someone who like UX design, as on a phone, you need to be way more minimalistic, and you probably need to consciously decide what functionality and which elements to leave out, or implement completely differently than what we might be used to.

I'd really love to be able to have an easy way to tell my manager via IRC that I'll be late for a 1:1 while I'm on my way, or be able to make a quick inquiry in a chat channel while I'm traveling.

Anyone up for the challenge?