Appcelerator Titanium is an open source mobile application development tool for iPhone and Android which allows you to code apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I tested out the platform this morning. Having developed an iPhone application with Objective C before, I can tell you that Titanium makes the iPhone development process a whole lot easier. Getting the Android SDK working was a bit tricky but development itself is simple. I love being able to compile native applications by writing standard web code!
Here’s an example of just how easy it can be:
Code for a simple Titanium App
The Titanium app in iPhone
The Titanium app in Android
Getting the Andriod emulator installed correctly can be a real pain. After you have downloaded the Android SDK, open the Android SDK and AVD Manager and make sure you install all of these:
- Android SDK Tools
- SDK Platform Android 1.5, API 3
- Google APIs by Google Inc., Android API 3
In your Titanium Developer profile, set the Android API location to /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86. Also, I found the Android emulator to be frustratingly slow, but I don’t think that’s Titanium’s fault.
To create useful mobile applications I think it would be a good idea to start with the following:
- Userstand the role of windows and views in iPhone applications,
- Download and browse the Kitchen Sink application to get an idea of the UI components available in Titanium.
I have included some screenshots of the Kitchen Sink application built in Titanium below so you can get an idea of what can be done.
Slider UI
Entering text input
Saving data on the device
Realy cool! Thanks for sharing!
you should check out konysoultions.com
Nice looking phones, now the Iphone has come though I doubt such items will catch on
Thanks for the post.
We tried Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile. We invested $20,000 in creating an iPad application (that we hoped to port to Andriod) for a very high profile client. It was an extensive sales demo of the client’s product lines.
We almost had the app complete. However, we were experiencing memory leaks and the app would consistently crash almost half way through, due to being out of memory. Most of the app was written in Javascript.
We had paid several hundred for their Titanium Professional support. And we posted details and code asking for help. Weeks went by with no solution. Others were apparently having similar issue.
I wrote an email to the CTO and CC’d their CEO asking for help and thankfully I was sent a response almost immediately.
Our Support rep admitted verbally that Titanium doesn’t necessarily clean up memory properly. And it became clear to us that there was a bug with Titanium as a ticket to resolve it, was posted by our Support rep. But it was not expected to be resolved until May 2011. Needless to say, my client can’t wait that long and who knows if it would even be fixed.
I wrote another complaint to our Support contact, stating that I had a choice to abandon Appcelerator and rewrite the app in Objective C – or get this resolved through Appcelerator. Because I cannot risk losing our client and the potential business with their affiliates. I was willing to invest additional Enterprise Support fees if I had to.
A second teleconference was arranged. However, it took a different tone. Despite the ticket being posted by their own staff, and despite our ability to recreate the issue, Appcelerator executives did not admit to having a bug that was causing the issue. They wanted us to pay $375.00 per hour for one of their developers to perform a code walk-through. I am not willing to invest $375 per hour, for what I would guess would at least be another 20 to 40 hours of work for someone else to look through and learn our code, and then possibly provide some sort of alternative work-around due to their bug.
I had complained about excessive fees, and stated that we have already heavily invested in the project and as I see it, we have been helping them debug their own product. They sent me another rather short email stating that they have also invested in helping us without charge – and the lowest they could go is $250.00 per hour.
Needless to say, all of us on my team are extremely disappointed in Appcelerator’s response, attitude and treatment – and the fact that we could not get their tools to work as advertised. “If you can dream it, you can build it”.
I find it hard to believe that the clients in their Showcase, haven’t experienced similar issues. But perhaps you need to be a billion dollar company to get appropriate support and priority from Appcelerator.
If you decide to use Titanium Mobile, I wish you the best of luck.
I have to say I’m not surprised by the comments above.
Think about it – Apple and Google spend million and millions of dollars making sure their platform, the APIs, developer tools, runtimes etc are as robust and reliable as possible. They employ hardware experts, OS experts, etc to ensure that everything works.
Then some third party company comes along with a fraction of the expertise and man power and tries to layer their own platform across all of these APIs. And surprise surprise it isn’t anywhere as reliable as the native API. And you can’t Google resolutions to problems when because no-one else uses it. So you end up paying through the nose for their “expertise”.
As an app builder you’ve really got to ask yourself – do I want to nail my company’s future to the long term properity of Google, Apple etc and their ability to keep producing a stable platform, or do I want to go with a complete unknown with no track record and might not be around in 5 years?
These sorts of “we’ll handle the porting between platforms for you” solutions are rarely anything other than magic beans (Google “Lansa” for a particularly hideous example). You’re better off biting the bullet and investing in getting the raw Andriod, iOS, etc skills into your company and developing natively. It will more than pay off in the long run.
Thank you for the advice Darren, appreciated.