4 ms·

Refreshingly honest, considering it's written by an appcelerator employee. The main concern I have about either of these is that there are no awesome ahowcase

by abalone 15y ago

Refreshingly honest, considering it's written by an appcelerator employee. The main concern I have about either of these is that there are no awesome ahowcase apps out there that prove they work well. There are quite a few awful ones. I am attracted to titanium's promise of native look and feel, but the author admits that there are unresolved performance issues and other drawbacks. Phonegap seems even worse when compared to native UI. What is the best nontrivial, well-performing titianium or phonegap app you know of?

lucian1900 15y ago
I think the eBay (Android, at least) app is made with Titanium.
inkaudio 15y ago
For a titanium example I recommend Wunderlist. It is used by millions of people on multiple platforms, I use it everyday and it works well. Moreover Wunderlist is a good example for hackers because it is open source: https://github.com/6wunderkinder/wunderlist https://github.com/6wunderkinder/wunderlist main site: http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/ http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/ One caveat, I'm not sure how many of the current apps (there are 5 versions with an addtional blackberry app in private beta.) still uses Titanium, and Wunderlist has been ported to platforms that are not supported by Titanium. However I know that the first few releases did use Titanium.
- ilja 15y ago
  The first Wunderlist for android was a Titanium app, but is was very slow and unusable. They rebuild it again natively: http://www.6wunderkinder.com/blog/2011/09/05/wunderlist-for-android-rebuilt-relaunched-and-really-awesome/ http://www.6wunderkinder.com/blog/2011/09/05/wunderlist-for-... I think the IOS version is still Titanium? A high performing Titanium example on android would interest me also.
  - JVIDEL 15y ago
    Got a link to the old one's APK file?
RowanH 15y ago
There's a showcase page on their website - http://www.appcelerator.com/thinkmobile/showcase http://www.appcelerator.com/thinkmobile/showcase ZipCars pretty notable...
kwhinnery 15y ago
+1 on checking out the showcase page. TripLingo has a nice Android app, I would check them out in particular. Yes, limitations in our abstraction layer is the biggest engineering challenge we face. That's true of any framework that creates a higher level API over the top of an existing API (Rails, Struts, Flex, etc). As the abstraction layer hardens, hardware gets faster, and platforms improve (Android is, IMHO, an inferior platform in terms of UI performance generally, but is getting better)... our performance across the board will improve. It's very usable and widely deployed now, but we know it still needs to get much better.
rada 15y ago
A couple months ago, I made a Titanium app as part of the interview process for my current employer. The app is B2B, not available through the store, so I will try to compensate below. The app appears non-trivial to the user. There is a QR code reader that takes snapshots of industrial equipment, saves the URLs to a local database, long-polls the URLs to continually display fancy gauges that mirror actual hardware output in real time, and pops up service information when equipment stops running. Performance-wise, the app is laggy but the lagginess is perceptually the same as similar well-established native apps. All QR/barcode scanners are slow and all data access over wireless is slow so what if Titanium tacks on an extra second or two. (I don't have any benchmarks either way, it could be the same for all I know). To explain, I believe it's an established fact that to the end user, anything under 2 seconds is "fast" and anything over is "slow". There is no differentiation. Productivity-wise, the app took 2 full days and several evenings to develop. For reference, my programming background is: web development - advanced, javascript - fair but hardly advanced, mobile - zero, stateful/compiled/memory managed applications - zero. As you can imagine, Titanium takes all the credit. My overall impression is that Titanium is the right tool for the right job (horrible documentation notwithstanding). The lack of "awesome" apps is probably because it's not right for games and hardware-centered apps. To put things in perspective, I am a medium-heavy app consumer and for me personally, games and hardware-centered apps comprise maybe 25% of what's in my iPhone and iPad. That leaves a whole lot of applications that could easily be done with Titanium. Go to the Apple's marketplace right now and filter out all the games. Then filter out all the apps where the app is just a thin frame for the content (I say that because I am pretty sure you wouldn't notice if Titanium was used in place of native, because of the 1-to-1 API to native UI). I bet you are going to feel that there are very few awesome showcase apps left there too. That's just the nature of the beast.

by abalone 15y ago

lucian1900 15y ago

I think the eBay (Android, at least) app is made with Titanium.

inkaudio 15y ago

For a titanium example I recommend Wunderlist. It is used by millions of people on multiple platforms, I use it everyday and it works well. Moreover Wunderlist is a good example for hackers because it is open source: https://github.com/6wunderkinder/wunderlist https://github.com/6wunderkinder/wunderlist main site: http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/ http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/ One caveat, I'm not sure how many of the current apps (there are 5 versions with an addtional blackberry app in private beta.) still uses Titanium, and Wunderlist has been ported to platforms that are not supported by Titanium. However I know that the first few releases did use Titanium.

ilja 15y ago
The first Wunderlist for android was a Titanium app, but is was very slow and unusable. They rebuild it again natively: http://www.6wunderkinder.com/blog/2011/09/05/wunderlist-for-android-rebuilt-relaunched-and-really-awesome/ http://www.6wunderkinder.com/blog/2011/09/05/wunderlist-for-... I think the IOS version is still Titanium? A high performing Titanium example on android would interest me also.
- JVIDEL 15y ago
  Got a link to the old one's APK file?

RowanH 15y ago

There's a showcase page on their website - http://www.appcelerator.com/thinkmobile/showcase http://www.appcelerator.com/thinkmobile/showcase ZipCars pretty notable...

kwhinnery 15y ago

+1 on checking out the showcase page. TripLingo has a nice Android app, I would check them out in particular. Yes, limitations in our abstraction layer is the biggest engineering challenge we face. That's true of any framework that creates a higher level API over the top of an existing API (Rails, Struts, Flex, etc). As the abstraction layer hardens, hardware gets faster, and platforms improve (Android is, IMHO, an inferior platform in terms of UI performance generally, but is getting better)... our performance across the board will improve. It's very usable and widely deployed now, but we know it still needs to get much better.

rada 15y ago

A couple months ago, I made a Titanium app as part of the interview process for my current employer. The app is B2B, not available through the store, so I will try to compensate below. The app appears non-trivial to the user. There is a QR code reader that takes snapshots of industrial equipment, saves the URLs to a local database, long-polls the URLs to continually display fancy gauges that mirror actual hardware output in real time, and pops up service information when equipment stops running. Performance-wise, the app is laggy but the lagginess is perceptually the same as similar well-established native apps. All QR/barcode scanners are slow and all data access over wireless is slow so what if Titanium tacks on an extra second or two. (I don't have any benchmarks either way, it could be the same for all I know). To explain, I believe it's an established fact that to the end user, anything under 2 seconds is "fast" and anything over is "slow". There is no differentiation. Productivity-wise, the app took 2 full days and several evenings to develop. For reference, my programming background is: web development - advanced, javascript - fair but hardly advanced, mobile - zero, stateful/compiled/memory managed applications - zero. As you can imagine, Titanium takes all the credit. My overall impression is that Titanium is the right tool for the right job (horrible documentation notwithstanding). The lack of "awesome" apps is probably because it's not right for games and hardware-centered apps. To put things in perspective, I am a medium-heavy app consumer and for me personally, games and hardware-centered apps comprise maybe 25% of what's in my iPhone and iPad. That leaves a whole lot of applications that could easily be done with Titanium. Go to the Apple's marketplace right now and filter out all the games. Then filter out all the apps where the app is just a thin frame for the content (I say that because I am pretty sure you wouldn't notice if Titanium was used in place of native, because of the 1-to-1 API to native UI). I bet you are going to feel that there are very few awesome showcase apps left there too. That's just the nature of the beast.