Appcelerator - who uses it?

Question

1 Do you use appcelerator?

2 Would you recommend it? Has it lead you to a dead end, and you thought to yourself why did I ever use appcelerator now im stuck!?

3 Where do you get started? cant seem to find many tutorial sites online?

Answer 1

Answer to Question #3

http://developer.appcelerator.com/

tutorials, videos and documentation

Answer 2

We tried using it for our mobile apps at the company I work for. It worked out OK for the iPhone version, however we ran into some serious problems when we tried integrating 3rd party iPhone libraries into that app.

The Android app Appcelerator generated was absolutely horrible. All kinds of crashes and a generally ugly app. We ended up just giving up on that and writing the Android app in Java. Appcelerator says they support iOS and Android apps and are adding Blackberry, but from my experience all they really support is iOS, everything else is just an afterthought to them. So the whole reason we went with it, to write one app and have it available for multiple platforms, really didn't work out for us at all. The problem is you will think it is going to provide this for you when you first test it, but once your app starts to get big and you start doing more complicated things in your app, you are going to find that what it generates isn't very good.

If you want to write an iPhone app, don't care so much about including any 3rd party libraries, and you would rather use JavaScript than Objective C, then Appcelerator might be a good solution for you. If you truly care about creating a good native Android app, or even a really good native iOS app, then I would stay far away from Appcelerator.

One other thing, their compiler program thing is a bug ridden piece of junk. It's constantly crashing, takes forever to compile anything, and is constantly sending usage information over the web. It doesn't work offline or from behind a proxy server because it refuses to compile or do anything unless it can send that usage information every time you click a button in the app.

Needless to say, I do not recommend Appcelerator at all.

Answer 3

Answer for all your questions:

1. Yes, I'm using Titanium to develop an iPhone app.

2. Recommend for using Titanium for developing iPhone app, because it has many module for iPhone, so you can save a lot of time instead writing your own code. But let consider if use it for Android. Our team is at first using Titanium for both Android and iPhone, but finally we decide to only keep Titanium for iPhone. Titanium for Android is lack some feature, especially is pickerview - one of the most common control. Let wait for the next version of Titanium (1.5 - in this month) and consider.

3. Titanium has a great code sample, this is KitchenSink project. Let checkout KitchenSink from Github (http://github.com/appcelerator/KitchenSink), import to Titanium and see how it work.

Answer 4

1. Yes, our company uses Titanium for both Mobile and Desktop development.

2. It's a fantastic framework for very fast development, but it is full of bugs. We have a lot of workarounds for common bugs. And the documentation is really bad! We hope with the release of Titanium 1.1 for Desktop many bugs will be fixed (comes this month).

3. KitchenSink is a great example and Google will help a lot.

Answer 5

1 Yes, it is amazing.

If you are already an objective C ninja then just do native iPhone code. I however have a lot of Java, C# experience and did C in the past but objective C was too painful. I installed Titanium and everything on my Mac in the morning and had a decent functioning prototype by noon. Javascript is an elegant language and they convert that to native code specific to each device.

2 Would certainly recommend it. The project has a lot of momentum right now and it will only continue to grow and get better. I like the fact that I can write code in a very elegant and easy to use language (JavaScript) and it then generates the objective c code. You can then open that code up in Xcode if you want and compile in there after it in interpreted which is pretty neat. The cross platform features are not as awesome as they make it out to be. You definitely have to do some work to have a single code base that builds and runs on multi platform. But, it's getting better and better all the time.

3 Where do you get started? cant seem to find many tutorial sites online? Their website has videos on how to install it and how to get the Kitchen sink up and running. Also, get the Kitchensink running as soon as possible. It will show you everything you can do very easily with Titanium. If you want to make crazy games or do very complex things that don't appear to be in the Kitchensink you may need to sling some Objective c code.

Overall I would recommend it. I have written 3 mobile apps using it thus far.

Answer 6

I posted a summary of two weeks of work with Titanium here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1482586/comparison-between-corona-phonegap-titanium/4017179#4017179

I can only second the others above, working on a Windows PC/Android - there are just too many bugs to use it professionaly right now. Their marketing department seems to get it right thou and it is Open Source. It seems to have momentum so it might become useful within a year or so for ordinary webapp functionality (but faster).