Mobile and open source

Phone Gap Session

• Gingko Street Labs helped the Young Invincibles create a mobile app that helps young healthy people find insurance.

• This session is about how other folks are using Cordoba / Phone Gap?

• What is Cordoba? If you have something written in HTML/CSS/Javascript, it will compile it into an app for a variety of platforms: iOS, Android, FirefoxOS.

• How do you make it responsive to different screen configs and sizes. James uses Pure and Twitter Bootstrap.

• Phonegap overhead is high. It's megabytes large. And not native, so there's a performance hit.

• Apache Cordoba = Phone Gap. One product, two names. Nobody is quite sure why.

• Parse is another way for people to create mobile apps. It includes a toolset for push notifications and other stuff. Native SDKs for iOS and Android. Parse is associated with Facebook, which will store your app for you. But if Facebook is involved, we shouldn't put sensitive data anywhere near it.

• Appcelerator is another option.

• FirefoxOS, what is it? Alternative mobile os. HTML/CSS/Javascript. Aimed at lower-resource phones. This is crucial market that rich American Android dev shops have neglected.

• Tor does not work on FirefoxOS yet. But it's under way!

• Tor isn't on iOS, partly because of tech issues, funding issues and GPL-app store issues.

• Where does mobile fit into non-profit or community-organizing strategy?

• It kind of depends on your context. In some communities, you need to be on mobile. In others, it's just a PITA. In lots of places where connectivity and device resources are scarce, mobile seems like a good idea. In practice, all the things that affect connectivity and device resources have other effects that make effective work difficult.

• Fetch conference updates via RSS.

• What about permissions? Too broad. Is there a way to raise awareness on this? Are there tech fixes for this stuff? Maybe in the domestic violence space. But while this is addressable via tech, CyanogenMod won't do it for fear of Google. And the apps that used to do this aren't updated or maintained.

• Maybe the social justice community should have best practices around privacy for mobile apps and to limit permissions. And there is a lot of education needed before people even realize they need to consult that.

• WE ARE MAD FUJ! Mobile App Developers For Universal Justice!

• Phone Gap can be used to make proprietary software. Boo! Hiss!

• NGOs that make mobile tech and choose ethical approaches should talk about it in public. Be a case study and throw that case study up on your website, warts and all.

• MAD FUJ needs to do two things: best practices, link to case studies

• what are your favorite open source mobile apps? Twidere, Droid Edit, AnkiDroid, Plantifier, TextSecure

• Gunner needs a knowledge base to tie together his whole community diaspora.

• We should all join diaspora and use the hash tag #npdev.