Those guys at GitHub have always been forward thinking and Open friendly !

So you ave probably heard that Mozilla is getting into “Apps” in a big way (https://apps.mozillalabs.com/)

There are couple of things about HTML5 apps that are different than conventional native apps.

First, because they are web technology they want to live somewhere on the web. Second, each app has a manifest (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Apps/Manifest) and that manifest needs to be served with a new, specific MIME type.

Now, if you self host on Linux this is trivial. You can just add an entry to the .htaccess file, but if you don’t want your app to have it’s own web presence there is another option.

This clever guy on my team, Rob Hawkes (http://rawkes.com/) is the Developer Community Gaming Lean on my team and he  worked with GitHub to add the ability to serve Mozilla Apps Manifests directly from your GitHub repository.

COOL !

Then, an independent game developer, Jerome Etienne (http://jetienne.com/) tested it by publishing a game in the Mozilla Labs Developer Preview Apps Store.

The game is called marbleSoccer and the GitHub is here – https://github.com/jeromeetienne/marbleSoccer

To install and run the game, start by installing the Mozilla Labs Apps  Runtime (we’re in preview, this step won’t always be necessary)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/app-runtime/

Then you need to log in to the store at :

You need a BrowserID to log in (which everyone should want to have, anyway) 🙂

https://browserid.org/

After logging in search the store for MarbleSoccer.

Once you have it installed you’re good to go.

There you go – game installed and running – hosted at GitHub

Great job guys !