Fedora Mobile Apps

Interacting with Fedora's web apps on the go.

Created by Ricky Elrod / @relrod6 / codeblock / relrod

About me

  • Intern at Red Hat on the Fedora Engineering team.
  • Involved with Fedora since early summer of 2010.
  • Active elsewhere in Open Source development.

The World is Going Mobile

  • In three years, global mobile traffic went from representing 1% of internet traffic to over 20%.
  • Mobile internet traffic is predicted to grow 400% by 2015.

My Vision as a Fedorian

  • Cell phones aren't going anywhere; why not harness that?
  • Lots of time and development on our web apps... but generally bad mobile UX.
    • Impossible to read without lots of scrolling/zooming.
    • Can't integrate with native phone APIs (more on this later).
    • Slow due to loading a full website with lots of resources.
      • For a desktop, this is fine.
      • On a phone, this can really slow things down and make for a bad UX.

Fedora Packages

Fedora Status

What can Fedora Mobile do right now?

  • Display a fedmsg newsfeed via datagrepper and hrf.
  • Search packages and show bits of information about them.
  • Show Infrastructure status.
  • Receive fedmsg notifications (very hacky proof-of-concept).

What do we want it to be able to do? (no particular order)

  • Use the Android Accounts APIs to integrate with FAS.
    • (This depends on fas-oauth, which is a WIP)
  • Integrate with Fedora Badges.
    • Scan a QR code → get badges for attending events
  • Proper fedmsg integration that isn't horrible.
  • Koji/Bodhi integration? Send packages to stable on the go?
  • Read/search docs and/or manpages?
  • Fedocal integration of some sort.
  • Your cool ideas here.

What *don't* we want it to do?

  • Interact with strictly third-party apps that Fedora uses.
    • (There's a fine line here that we should define.)
    • Examples: Bugzilla, Ask Fedora, Mediawiki, Mailman.
  • These kinds of apps would be better dealt with in separate, dedicated mobile apps.

How does it work?

  • It's primarily written in Scala — but don't be scared!
  • Scala inter-operates seamlessly with Java and we accept patches in both!
  • But, we encourage you to take a look at Scala. You might like it.

Purpose of this hackfest

  • Get thoughts on what is done so far.
  • Discuss future plans proposed and see if they make sense.
  • Get ideas for new future plans.
  • Discuss maybe doing similar apps for other platforms?
    • Firefox OS?
    • Ubuntu Edge?

THE END

Questions?

Thank you!