[sschwarzhoff]

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 it. Sample projects, code completion, and other frequently-asked features will be included. Titanium Studio ships this week.

Certainly there are other areas in your post where we can improve. Know that we are making investments in all of the areas you describe and we certainly appreciate everyone's support as we grow the platform, the community, and the supporting infrastructure behind it.

Thanks again for your feedback

Best Regards,

Scott Schwarzhoff VP, Developer Relations

[tannerburson]

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 company isn't trying to move things forward? But as a user, I frankly don't care about how much better things will be. I just want to get things done, and the current state of your product makes that difficult. Worse than that, the current track-record of development (as witnessed by may comments here!) doesn't show a lot of progress.

I earnestly look forward to seeing improvements in the near future, as I have an application to deploy and support!

[sschwarzhoff]

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...

[mattjaynes]

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