[Screenshots] Mozilla’s Mobile OS, Boot2Gecko (B2G)

Mozilla has been working on its own Mobile OS code named “Boot to Gecko”(B2G) for quite sometime. B2G is a browser based operating system built using the standard web technology stack. B2G is expected to run on low end smart phones as well. I am impressed with the idea of using standard web technologies for mobile app development (on the similar lines of Windows 8 HTML5 apps). Mozilla claims that they are working on web APIs to expose device capabilities such as telephony and other media devices. The project is still in its early stages. B2G was show running on Samsung Galaxy S2 at the Mobile World Congress last month. If you are interested in contributing to this project, check out the code from here. Neat instructions are provided to build the code and an Android based emulator is also included for testing. B2G uses the same low level building blocks (Linux kernel, libusb, etc) which Android uses. I played around with it last night and here are some screenshots of B2G. The user interface was a bit on the slower side in the emulator.

 

 

-- Varun

[How to] Setup a mobile version for your blogger blog

Google is taking its battle with Wordpress to the next level with the introduction of mobile optimized blogs. Undoubtedly Wordpress is the supreme full-featured blogging platform when compared to Google’s Blogger but Blogger is closing that gap by adding lots of features this year. Some of the cool features introduced this year include static pages, real-time stats, dynamic template, spam filtering, etc. The latest addition to that pack is Mobile templates (Available only in Beta). Enabling this feature will offer a mobile optimized version of your blog.

How to enable mobile templates

• Open http://blogger.com from your browser. Go to the dashboard. It will list all your blogs.
• A popup will appear asking you to enable Mobile templates. Click on “Turn on mobile templates”
• Alternately, you can click on the “Settings” option of the blog and go to the tab “Email & Mobile” to enable / disable the mobile templates.
• You can access the mobile version by pointing your mobile browser to “<blog_address>/?m=1” (Ex: http://blog.varunkumar.me/?m=1). QR code for the same will be shown as soon as you enable the mobile templates.

How to setup a custom sub-domain

• After enabling the mobile template, you may want to setup a custom sub-domain to point to the mobile version. Most of the sites use m. as the sub-domain.
• You can achieve this by setting up an URL forwarding from your domain manager. If you have bought the domain from godaddy.com, you can follow the instructions here.
• Add sub-domain ‘m’ and forward it to your mobile blog address.
• Now, share this mobile address with your readers.

-- Varun