about:mozilla is a weekly round-up of news and contribution opportunities. Here’s what’s happening this week.

Introducing Open Badges 1.0

Imagine that you could earn badges for skills you learn online to show them to your friends, teachers or perhaps your future employer. Well, you no longer have to imagine: After more than two years of hard work, we are proud to announce that Mozilla Open Badges 1.0, an open platform that recognizes learning, has finally been released. Because we all learn things in a wide variety of ways these days, there have to be more opportunities to gain formal recognition for these skills. And since there was never a way to take all these skills and show them off in one place before, Open Badge changes that! Find out more about how you can get started and earn your first badge now.

Firefox OS Simulator – Previewing Version 3.0
Three months ago, we told you how to test Firefox OS on your computer using the Firefox OS Simulator. We’ve made a lot of progress since, and now, we’d like to show you a preview of the upcoming new version. One of the biggest new features is that you are able to push apps installed in the simulator directly to your Firefox OS device, if you have one. And you can finally rotate the simulator or validate your code. Last but not least, the user interface of Firefox OS has been updated too. Be among the first to test the preview and give us some feedback!

Interviews About Contributing to Firefox
This semester at Michigan State University, a group of students will be working on a senior capstone project with Mozilla. Jared Wein shows them how to fix bugs and improve the multi-touch gestures in Firefox. And they’ve made a lot of progress! A couple of days ago, Jared sat down with the three students and asked them about their experience and what they thought about contributing to open-source software. Go ahead and watch the interviews on his blog.

And the Game On Competition Winners Are…
This year’s “Game On” competition was all about pushing the frontiers of gaming on the web. And now, after we have received more than 165 awesome entries, with competitors from Morocco to Russia to Canada, we are thrilled to announce the winners! Many took advantage of new open web innovations to showcase new gaming potential on the web, like the grand prize winning game “Zumbie: Blind Rage”. The best “hackable game” Code Injection allows you to inject real code to move your character around. Check out (and play) the winning games or other entries on the Mozilla blog.

Why Cameron Switched (Back) to Firefox
Cameron Paul is a software engineer who likes maths, music and computers. Firefox had been his browser of choice for years, but in 2008, he switched to Google Chrome, because he thought that Firefox was bloated and slow. Now, he’s having issues with general slowness in Chrome too. So he decided to use Firefox again and noticed that it got faster and has more developer tools. “I honestly believe Mozilla is committed to freedom and privacy on the web. Google is committed to making money and knowing everything I do.”, he says in his blog post. Read his full story or let us know if you know somebody else who switched (back) to Firefox.

Photo of the Week

Volunteers at the Hive learning network in Athens. Cheese!

Upcoming events
* March 19 – Malaga, Spain: Firefox OS Talk and Hackday
* March 22 – Toronto, Canada: Game Night
* March 23 – Mombasa, Kenya: Firefox OS App day
* March 23 – Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela: Document Freedom Day
* March 23 – Makati City, Philippines: SMART Game Development Conference
* Learn more about these and more events or find even more near you on the Events Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!

about:mozilla is a weekly round-up of news and contribution opportunities. Here’s what’s happening this week.

Brand New: Mozilla to Mobile OSes: Fox You.

Unlike the system icons or logos of Safari and Chrome, Firefox’s has always been the most memorable, with an adorable fox wrapping its tail around the globe. Since we didn’t want to reuse the exact same logo for Firefox OS, we worked with Wolff Olins to unleash the fox with an awesome branding. Here you can see the first drawings of the fast and powerful fox. Why don’t you take a look at the finished illustrations and the different poses of the fox?

Wrap Long Lines & Watch Videos at Ludicrous Speeds
Who doesn’t love a sneak preview? Well, we do! In his latest two blog posts, Jared Wein tells you about two upcoming features that you can already test in a bleeding-edge Nightly build< /a> of Firefox. The first feature allows you to read long .txt files easier than ever before by adapting the line length to the size of the browser window. The second addition allows you to adjust the playback speed of a video by simply right-clicking on it. So now you can watch videos in slow motion, high speed or ludicrous speed.

Webmakers Shake Athens & MozFest 2013
Matt Thompson, Chief Storyteller of Mozilla, has got so many new updates regarding the Mozilla Webmaker project for you this week! The most exciting thing that is new this week is a video that explains what the “web literacy standard” is and how you can get involved. The second update is from Hive Athens, a new webmaking network in Greece that drew over a hundred kids to multiple activity stations for webmaking (and doing the Harlem Shake). Last but not least, Matt tells you the date for this year’s Mozilla Festival in London, an event that provides a mix of making and learning mayhem.

Making HTML5 work with Firefox OS
Christian Heilmann just got back from CeBIT in Germany, the world’s largest and most international computer expo. His part of the show was to give a talk about Firefox OS and what it means to HTML 5. He went through the different parts that make Firefox OS special – for example to search for apps by content. For example, you enter the name of a band and get Music, Video and Lyrics apps. He also came up with an interesting simile: Find out why Firefox OS is the Volkswagen Beetle of smartphones in his blog post.

Font Inspector in Firefox Nightly
If you’re a developer, you probably already know about the element inspector that allows you to test changes to your websites and view the source code of other pages easier than ever before. Paul Rouget, a Mozillian since 2003, now built a font inspector you can access in the inspector. It shows you the font used by the selected element, its name and a preview. Find out more about the font inspector on his blog.

Video of the Week

This is the Mozilla edition of the Harlem Shake in Greece. Woohoo!

Upcoming events
* March 14 & 15 – Munich, Germany: UX Munich
* March 16 – Sucre, Bolivia: Firefox OS App Workshop
* March 16 – Tunis, Tunisia: WoMoz Café
* March 16 – Zamboanga City, Philippines: Zamboanga City goes Mobile – Open Source Style
* March 17 – Haldia, India: MozCamp @ HIT
* Learn more about these events or find even more near you on the Events Calendar

Get Involved
These are just some of the available contribution opportunities. Learn more about other ways to get involved and find other Mozillians in our community who share your interests.

About about:mozilla
The newsletter is written by Mozilla’s Community Engagement team and is published every Tuesday. For more on what has been happening this week also checkout the Mozilla Project Meeting. If you have anything you would like to include in our next issue, please contact: about-mozilla[at]mozilla[dot]com or send us a status message on mozilla.status.net or a tweet @aboutmozilla. You can also subscribe to the email version.

Have a good week folks and keep rocking the Web!