Look and Feel in Firefox OS

not that easy (yet)

So I’m sitting here, trying to build my first Firefox OS app at the Firefox OS Oslo meetup.

The first thing tried was making a logo. I just made a very simple png, 128x128, and added it to my app’s root directory. The good thing is, the logo showed up in the simulator right away. But - in contrast to all the other round circly icons - mine was square. I kind of hoped the OS would take care of making icons rounded so that they would easier fit into the overall look and feel.

The other thing I wanted was that my app has the Firefox OS look. So Mozilla has these Building blocks for this, which is generally a good thing. I wanted the header block, and went and pasted the code into my index.html.

Problem is, you have to download all the css, images and fonts that are needed to style the building blocks into your project. This really should come bundled with the OS. It seems wrong that developers must copy these assets into all their apps.

This could actually become a real problem over time. Let’s say Mozilla decides to change out their default icons at some point. There’s no way to do that with the current architecture. Sure, they can change all system apps. But all other custom apps that want to have the Firefox OS look and feel will have to “upgrade” their assets manually.