Last time I showed you the Flame device which is our reference device for
developers
and people who want to get to know what a mid-tier device on Firefox OS would look
like.
Once you have your Flame set up it comes like this. By the time the video is out, there
might be a new one so keep up to date, it's really easy to upgrade your
operating system.
To turn this phone into a proper developer phone you just go into settings
and you go into the internet settings
of the phone itself: "device information". Once you're there you click on "more
information"
and then you turn on the developer menu. When you now go back to the main settings
you will get a developer menu that would be confusing for normal end users
but is a real real interesting point for you as a developer.
You have for example the layer borders, you have tile borders, a hardware
composer, the tiling, the over scrolling:
everything that happens in the interface itself to the video card
to the memory can now be inspected by you and that is much much better than
trying to do it over USB and seeing it in the ADB
log but you can do that as well if you wanted to. A very interesting new section
that we have in Firefox OS now is the "developer HUD".
Once you turn that on here and you see it it overlays information onto the
screen for you.
You show the system HUD and all of a sudden you see how much memory is being
used by the system right now
and how much memory is being used by the app that you're currently debugging.
As everything in Firefox OS is an application including the Settings screen
you can actually debug that setting screen while you're using it.
You can also turn on the frames per second which shows you up there how many
frames per second are being used,
the time to load: how long it took to actually load the application that you have
right now,
reflows, yank and all those different settings that you need as a developer.
You see the memory consumption of the app itself and you can cut it down to
like how many JS objects, JS strings and so on have been set for you.
That allows you on the device to see how your app is doing
and for app developers that has been always a pain so we set up this HUD for
you.
Turn it on, test your application, tweak it until it's fast and then bring it to the
marketplace
and other Firefox OS users out there will be happy.