The Major Pitfall Of Appcelerator

If you don't know, appcelerator is a great tool used to build native iPhone / Android apps in native Javascript. As of lately, the Appcelerator team seems to be releasing quite a few updates to their once buggy SDK. Although still buggy, it's much better than this last year.

One MAJOR pitfall that I have seemed to notice after working with appcelerator on MANY different applications is that it's event listeners for touchstart, touchmove & touchstop are unbearably slow. It may be because instead of interacting with objective-c directly, the mods that make up appcelerator and it's communication with Javascript seems to be far to slow to make anything really cool in Appcelerator...

Example One:
1) Making a drawing application using only native javascript is not impossible. The code is rather simple... Create a canvas then map the touchstart and touchmove event listeners, creating a small view. Although this code works, it's ridiculously slow.


var win = Ti.UI.createWindow({ backgroundColor : '#E0E0E0' });
win.open();

win.addEventListener('touchstart', function(e)
{
var dot = Ti.UI.createView({ top : e.y, left : e.x, backgroundColor : '#000', width : 15, height : 15 });
win.add(dot);
Ti.API.debug(e.source);
});

win.addEventListener('touchmove', function(e)
{
var dot = Ti.UI.createView({ top : e.y, left : e.x, backgroundColor : '#000', width : 15, height : 15 });
win.add(dot);
});

Example Two:
Creating a sliding menu is no impossibly either. I created it to where you can use your finger to drag a view from left to right opening and closing the view to show additional options. I won't post code for this example as it's quite a bit more complicated, it's extremely slow and I urge EVERYONE not to waste any time on this.

Long story short, if you need to develop any apps that require cool features like this, either build an objective-c module for appcelerator or use native objective-c. It's really the only thing you can do. Hybrid technology is helpful to an extent in my experience. I recommend learning objective-c to build native modules. This will solve many troubles.

Just a heloful blog post! hope someone finds it helpful.

Appcelerator...!! Opinions from a PHP developer!

For those of you who don't know, developing iPhone applications just got a whole lot easier for web programmers. If you are not an objective-c coder, you may have heard rumors that picking up this language compared to PHP, Javascript or nearly any other web-language is quite complicated and cumbersome. These rumors are completely TRUE! But if you have some extra time to learn objective-c, then Bucky at www.TheNewBoston.com does a freaking awesome job of explaining it in video tutorials! Check it out at www.TheNewBoston.com.

Anyway... Appcelerator.com has a software that allows web developers to develop iPhone, Android & Blackberry apps using a javascript framework. It's pretty awesome. However, like everything else, the dumbed down programming side of it is not without repercussions! You will NOT have as much functionality as you would programming directly in objective-c. HOWEVER, the folks at appcelerator makes it fairly simple for objective-c developers to develop custom modules for damn near any one of your needs. Developing simple apps can be easy in Appcelerator, but building complicated apps actually gets quite involved!

The benefit of using Appcelerator compared to traditional objective-c is the speed of development! I am not a major objective-c developer (Bucky is teaching me now :-) Thanks Bucky!), but after doing research and hearing from other objective-c developers, appcelerator really cuts down on programming time. What it would take you 2 weeks in objective-c can take you a matter of days in Appcelerator. This should answer any objective-c developer questions on why in the hell they would ever think about using Appcelerator... If Appcelerator did not have the custom module development like they do, then I would urge you to stay FAR away from this product... But luckily, that is not the case!

I find that Appcelerator can be quite buggy, and they have lousy support and response times back on bugs and forum posts, but for the most part it's really not a bad deal. They do release SDK updates for their bugs every once in a while... I wish it were more. Having said all this, in this day and age, the world is moving to a mobile platform at a rapid pace and I urge anyone who is not moving this direction, to start doing so or you will be left behind. Yes you can always do web stuff, I dont' see this going away, however, the market for this is starting to get super cheap! VERY irritating for the self-employed developers out there like myself! Taking care of your family is getting harder... So what do you need to do to offset this in-justice ?? Move into a mobile field. Yes it's more work than traditional web development, but... the payoff can be greater as well!

All-in-all, my personal opinion as a well-seasoned PHP developer is that Appcelerator is a great tool to have regardless of the bugs and lousy support! If you know objective-c, then I think Appcelerator is a TREMENDOUS tool to have. If you have not checked it out, at least give it a try.