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by TomOfTTB 5549 days ago
I don't disagree with him but I still think Appcelerator is worth it. Because as annoying as Appcelerator can be it's still quicker than writing your app twice and Apple's devotion to objective-C makes it very hard to carry over code from other platforms.

I would give two warnings though (which are supported by the author's piece)...

1. You need to make sure your use case is covered in the Kitchen Sink example. If you can't take those pieces and put together what you want to build than you shouldn't bother with Appcelerator (the documentation is pretty useless)

2. You need to buy support. The community is non-existent but the staff support is pretty good. A lot of times their advice boils down to "just ignore that error" but that's helpful with a lot of the errors generated.

Also note Appcelerator just bought Aptana, a company that makes development software. So clearly they realize there's a problem are are taking steps to fix it.

Edit: One last thing in their defense. Though they've been slower than I'm happy with in making their platform easier they have added a lot of new features. Things like Bump, bar code reading, credit card reader support and in-app purchases aren't available elsewhere (though these were just announced so I don't know how well they work yet)

3 comments

I haven't bought support, so I can only speculate based on their community forum, and public bug tracker. With that out of the way, unless paid support gets custom code deployed to them fixing core platform problems, I don't see it as being a solution.

In it's current state I couldn't recommend Titanium to anyone. I hope it continues to improve, and get better, as both the idea and implementation have a ton of positives, it's just almost unusable right now for anything big enough to really see the benefits in the multi-platform support.

I'd be interested to know what you consider the core platform problems because I've never run into anything that couldn't be worked around.

Don't get me wrong. I sympathize. I lost several nights of sleep because I was so angry after a day of using Appcelerator that I literally couldn't calm myself down enough. There were days when I'd decided to not only stop using Appcelerator but to make it my life mission to tell other people to stay away from it.

But those days passed and eventually support (and a lot of manual error checking) got me through.

Here's two "show stoppers" that made me stop experimenting with Titanium.

1) If you have a custom UI, dragging the window around is painfully slow and erratic. Resizing the window is actually so slow it's unusable.

2) The built-in zip function doesn't seem to work with files over ~200 MB on Mac OS X.

I tried reaching Titanium, failed, and moved on.

I think most of us here mean Titanium Mobile when we say just "Titanium." Their desktop platform seems to have received much less attention from them, and is of much more questionable benefit than the mobile one, which doesn't have many alternatives whereas on the desktop there's Qt and all sorts of other things available.
My biggest beefs are: the fact that the build system is a complete black box that fails without a good indicator of what it takes to fix it, and inconsistencies in how events are handled, 'swipe' and 'scroll' being prime examples of events that either don't work as expected, or work in unexpected ways.
Aptana makes Java based SDKs and Eclipse plugins. I don't understand how having a slow, bloated code editor as your recommended development environment is going to fix anything.

Sure you may get better debugging tools, but that doesn't change the fact that their API is still incomplete, buggy, poorly documented, and lacking support.

Appcelerator's problem is focus. Instead of making their API rock solid on core platforms and building from there, they shipped it half finished while they chase after the next shiny thing (Blackberry support! Card readers! Our own code editor!)

I completely agree with your last sentence. I don't begrudge them opportunities to monetize their platform, but I can't help but be frustrated at watching new functionality being added on top of piles of bugs.
Your mention of the bar code reader is a particular sore spot with me. They've been promising to release it since October of last year ("just wait until next month") and then when the finally released it a couple weeks ago it only supported QR Codes.