Friday, February 6, 2015
Changes 2/6/15 - Bad Documentation
Getting access to hardware features on Firefox OS is really tough, because I find the documentation to be pretty confusing. A lot of times I'm not sure whether I'm looking at documentation for the browser firefox or firefox OS, and it seems like there are several different methods for accessing the camera, but only one of them works on the Flame. Additionally, console.log() doesn't log to the web console, but instead logs to the device for some reason, so I have to install adb and use logcat to read the logs. This is annoying because in trying to figure out whether the approach I'm using to take pictures is working, I'd like to be able to log to the web console in real time.
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Take a look at comment I made on Aki's post here:
ReplyDeletehttp://anicholakos-webdesign.blogspot.com/2015/02/firefox-apps.html
I'm not at all surprised that the documentation sucks. This is common in many free software projects, for the following reasons:
1. Writing really good documentation is difficult, and many software developers are not that good at it.
2. For folks deeply involved in the process of writing the software, the source code *is* the documentation, so writing introductory documentation for the uninitiated (folks like us) would be time consuming and unnecessary.
Good documentation is a great benefit to the community, of course, for all kinds of reasons, but it is understandable that it is often not there to be had.
That's why I asked you to put all your learning experiments on github so I (and others) can get easy access to them. I plan to contribute to the documentation effort to the degree that I am able, and having sample apps to use as source material for examples would be a big help.