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Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

tannerburson.com

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Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#51

Post by jamroom »

erik_p wrote: post #19

I'm looking forward to the inevitable follow up post on the author's experience with Phone Gap... Has anyone used Phone Gap before and wants to share their thoughts?

We moved to Titanium from PhoneGap around 5 months ago - PhoneGap was just too slow for many options and did not support the low level audio functionality we needed. It may be better now though, but we haven't looked. Titanium has actually worked really well for us so I'm a bit surprised by so many developers having issues on here. Our app is coming out in about a month and is fairly large, with a custom UI:

http://www.groovydisk.com/

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#52

Post by [deleted] »

skue wrote: post #39

So glad to see more people pointing this out. Titanium sounds like a great idea and they market it well, but when you look closer you quickly discover that it just fails to deliver. Sadly they seem too focused on spending VC cash on adding bells in whistles when their core functionality still doesn't work. Here are a few examples. Running their sample app. This is the first thing every developer does, so you'd think…

[deleted]

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#53

Post by [deleted] »

skue wrote: post #39

So glad to see more people pointing this out. Titanium sounds like a great idea and they market it well, but when you look closer you quickly discover that it just fails to deliver. Sadly they seem too focused on spending VC cash on adding bells in whistles when their core functionality still doesn't work. Here are a few examples. Running their sample app. This is the first thing every developer does, so you'd think…

[deleted]

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#54

Post by [deleted] »

skue wrote: post #39

So glad to see more people pointing this out. Titanium sounds like a great idea and they market it well, but when you look closer you quickly discover that it just fails to deliver. Sadly they seem too focused on spending VC cash on adding bells in whistles when their core functionality still doesn't work. Here are a few examples. Running their sample app. This is the first thing every developer does, so you'd think…

[deleted]

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#55

Post by skue »

skue wrote: post #39

So glad to see more people pointing this out. Titanium sounds like a great idea and they market it well, but when you look closer you quickly discover that it just fails to deliver. Sadly they seem too focused on spending VC cash on adding bells in whistles when their core functionality still doesn't work. Here are a few examples. Running their sample app. This is the first thing every developer does, so you'd think…

Forgot one other big issue that no one seems aware of: Appcelerator tracks your development with their tools. Titanium Developer transmits analytics data every time you create/import/edit/delete/compile/test/install/distribute a Titanium project on your system.

To see the specific calls, just download titanium_developer and grep for Titanium.Analytics.featureEvent. If you do use Titanium and want to disable this, you should build a new version of Developer after adding the following line to tiapp.xml:

  false
One last note: I don't make these points just to be mean-spirited. Appcelerator clearly has some talented programmers and great technology. But silent tracking isn't okay, and clearly someone at top needs to help them focus the talent they have.

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#56

Post by sschwarzhoff »

tannerburson wrote: post #37
sschwarzhoff wrote: post #14

Thanks for your feedback. Certainly lots of issues that we can and do plan to address. On the tools side, as several people have mentioned below, we are releasing a new IDE this week called Titanium Studio. This release will address two critical areas that you identified in your post: debugging and overall tooling stability. The IDE itself is based on Aptana Studio, which has several years of solid development behind…

I appreciate your comment, and it's great that you're reaching out to the developers using your platform. I'm excited to try out the debugging features of Titanium Studio, and hopefully it's more transparent in the steps it's taking to build an application as well. Your second paragraph rings a bit hollow though. I'm sure you all are committed to growing the platform, I'm sure you're making investments. What software…

Well, we just released Titanium Studio... with debugging. How's that for moving things forward? And sample projects and code are included, with a ton of new features coming in the full release later this quarter.

We have about 2,500 apps being built per month now. This number is increasing by about 50% month over month. In total, we have over 15,000 apps in the various app stores. That puts us as #1 go-to mobile development platform behind Apple and Google. Seriously.

Obviously, we'd love it if everyone was successful, but we're 50 people and running flat out. And that last round of $9M in funding? It's gone to QA, to acquiring Aptana, to adding 5 engineers in the past 6 weeks on Android, to quadrupling the amount of content out there (have you checked out our latest guides? They're awesome! http://wiki.appcelerator.org/display/guides/Home). There's a ton in there... and most have been written by the community!

Look, I'm not saying that we're perfect. We have LOTS to do. But we're a platform company that's listening intensely to developer needs on a very frequent basis and making big investments in the areas that need the most help.

So, yeah, Q&A needs a forum. Our API needs more parity, we certainly need to be more responsive to the 100 or so questions coming at us every day. But c'mon, if you're going to build a real native app in no time, a platform that has 3,600 methods and processes in use by 130,000 active app developers must have something going for it don't you think? Try Wunderlist. Try GetGlue. Try ScoutMob. These are all top apps written on Titanium with small dev teams. None of these apps were built with a support subscription, btw. Stick with it and you'll see just how much can be done with the platform.

Give us another shot with Titanium Studio and the other cool stuff that comes out this quarter. We'd love to see you back as a Titanium fan...

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#57

Post by drewda »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #32
hopeless wrote: post #3

I had a similar experience with the platform. I was very excited, browsed through the APIs to check the required features were there and jumped in. It then took ages to get the right versions of SDKs/XCode and Titanium installed, which also involved searching though forum posts and patching files. Finally I got the "Kitchen Sink" app working. All was good. I started implementing my app and quickly became flummoxed by…

Titanium is much, much more tolerable and sane if you ditch Ti.include and use its CommonJS Ti.require() instead.

Is that what screws up global events (at least on Android)?

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#58

Post by drewda »

skue wrote: post #39

So glad to see more people pointing this out. Titanium sounds like a great idea and they market it well, but when you look closer you quickly discover that it just fails to deliver. Sadly they seem too focused on spending VC cash on adding bells in whistles when their core functionality still doesn't work. Here are a few examples. Running their sample app. This is the first thing every developer does, so you'd think…

Yup, exactly! My own attempt at a contribution is just fixing some arithmetic https://github.com/appcelerator/titanium_mobile/pull/80> and it's going nowhere...

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#59

Post by mattjaynes »

sschwarzhoff wrote: post #56
tannerburson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your comment, and it's great that you're reaching out to the developers using your platform. I'm excited to try out the debugging features of Titanium Studio, and hopefully it's more transparent in the steps it's taking to build an application as well. Your second paragraph rings a bit hollow though. I'm sure you all are committed to growing the platform, I'm sure you're making investments. What software…

Well, we just released Titanium Studio... with debugging. How's that for moving things forward? And sample projects and code are included, with a ton of new features coming in the full release later this quarter. We have about 2,500 apps being built per month now. This number is increasing by about 50% month over month. In total, we have over 15,000 apps in the various app stores. That puts us as #1 go-to mobile deve…

Thanks for letting us know some of the backstory there.

It may be just me, but reading your comment makes me more worried about lack of focus there than less... It just seems very frenetic.

I've been developing on Titanium for several months now (as a paid subscriber) and more and more the decisions and priorities of the company really puzzle me. It seems like Appcelerator mostly ignores a shaky foundation while excitedly piling more 'features' on top of it and using tons of duct tape to try and keep it from collapsing before the money runs out.

The most compelling evidence for this is the pull requests being ignored for long periods of time. How can we be excited about a platform that is so slow to even accept help from the open source community to improve it? Meanwhile, I frequently get calls from Appcelerator trying to get me to buy in-person training and even a new 'certification' program. Really?! That's where your putting your resources rather than the actual platform supporting your 'platform'?

I really really want to like Titanium and be a fan, but right now it seems like asking me to please be a Microsoft fan. At this point I'd probably recommend MS over Ti. That's not a compliment :(

Please please please focus on your core experience. Ignoring it will drastically damage your reputation among hackers (as you can already see happening) - and hackers are the ones who decide which platforms to use (and which to abandon).

I would gladly pay several times more than I am now for an 'A' quality platform. Money is not an issue for many of us developers, but quality will be the deal killer here. I've many times wished that I could even pay a bounty to fix certain platform bugs.

Please please focus on your core.

Sincerely,

Someone who'd really really like to be a fan

Re: Appcelerator Titanium: From a developer's perspective

#60

Post by andymoe »

jamroom wrote: post #50
andymoe wrote: post #12

We used it to make a simple android app in the last month. It worked and I sure liked writing the app in JavaScript vs Java but we ran into huge issues with Titanium caching resources during the build process that were supposed have be removed or updated and leaving things behind that we then had to track down and manually remove. It basically just takes whatever is in the build directory and tries to package it with…

You need to clean your build directory whenever you change resources (i.e. add new images, delete old images). It makes the build take a bit longer but you'll have no issues. So i.e. just delete the contents of the Resources/build/iphone directory and then rebuild the app from Titanium.

Oh, I know how to solve the problem. I just think the tool could use work.
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