Helps
What options exist for mobile application development?
- Titanium
- Sencha Touch
- WebView
- PhoneGap
- jQuery Mobile
- … many others …
The general consensus seems to be that many of these frameworks work fine for simple applications, but quickly run into walls, bugs, and fails once things are less than straightforward. If you’re writing a simple application, it probably falls in the mobile web application category and then all you need is a web view. YMMV, but know what you want your application to do before making a choice. Most likely, you have to write a native application for each platform.
Interestings
- jQuery 1.4.4 Released Read the blog entry for details; if you’re having issues, they might be solved in this release.
My impression has been that these frameworks will get the easier parts done more quickly and that you then may have to drop down into native code to finish out the more complex pieces. Speaking on hearsay alone here, so I’d be interested to hear if someone has direct contradictory experience there, esp using Titanium (the direction we’re currently headed).
November 19, 2010 at 1:51 pm
We’re hopefully submitting an app to the app store today, that was built with Titanium. Our app does not use a lot of hardware features, other than location, but location was important. We chose to go this route vs. a web app (with say a Phonegap wrapper – you pretty much have to be in the App Store if you care about your app getting out there), for performance, quality of location, and truly making the app feel native. We have a high polish/quality app that looks awesome and we think will be a game changer in the travel industry.
My take on Titanium at this point is that it’s quite viable. There were a couple rough patches for us, where we considered if we should rewrite in Objective-C, but the reality is that we’re just way more efficient and effective using Titanium, and so many of the challenging aspects would have been just as hard in Objective-C (they were more about general app architecture and such, vs. limitations of the tools).
We are also using Coffeescript to write the app (which compiles to JavaScript, which is what you use for Titanium), and that’s made things nicer as well. Our app communicates with a Rails app for server needs, etc.
I’m happy enough with Titanium at this point, plus with the potential time it will save us if we support Android, that I expect to do any future apps with it as well. I would probably go native if I had a high performance game, or something that did really intensive stuff with camera/images or video, but I think for the bulk of apps, Titanium is a very appealing choice.
BTW, if you want to be notified when our app is available so you can check it out, or are just interested in what we’re doing, see: http://www.hoteltonight.com
December 2, 2010 at 10:47 am
Just a followup – our app [Hotel Tonight](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hotel-tonight-ny-la-sf/id407690035?mt=8) is available in the App Store if you want to check it out, and see how a Titanium app turned out.
I will say that at this point, Titanium’s main downside is their support and other ancillary aspects (like their analytics system has now been down for almost 2 weeks). I definitely cannot recommend paying for their enterprise support. We do pay for professional support, but that’s been questionable. Titanium is a young company and I think is going through some growing pains. We’ll see how their infusion of funding helps this…
December 29, 2010 at 11:00 am