Quick Overview: A Few Moments with Titanium

Actually, its not like PhoneGap. PhoneGap uses a UIWebView and stores your application in there, whereas Titanium compiles your code as a native iPhone Application. Titanium as a result will run faster on the iPhone than PhoneGap.

However, having fooled around with Titanium, I would like to point out a few flaws:

1. You are trusting on a middleman for your application.
2. Not all iPhone SDK features are implemented, including certain animations, and you can’t make anything Game related on Titanium (OpenGL not really supported)
3. Other things like iPod Library access are not supported.
4. Apple may not approve your application, because the code that Titanium generates may not be suitable to them (since you aren’t really handcoding the Obj-C component, you cannot gauge how well it is written)

This doesn’t mean Titanium is bad, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. I recently made some simple apps using Titanium, but returned to the iPhone SDK and Objective-C because I felt its best to learn the native tools.

It does not stay as Javascript – it is converted into a native binary at compile time (obj-c for all purposes).

An object literal is Javascript’s way of declaring objects. For example:

var car = {
tires: 4,
windshield: 1,
name: “Honda Civic”,

getCarName: function() {
return this.name;
}
};

Now, car is an object specified through the object literal above. You can now call on the car object by doing things such as var carname = car.getCarName(); or var numTires = car.tires;

The desktop and mobile versions of Titanium have two different methods of packaging/distribution. On the desktop side, we do wrap an instance of webkit with native chrome, notifications, etc. This gives us a nice cross-platform capability that works well across PC, Mac, and Desktop. Titanium Developer itself is a Titanium-written application… and I’d wager it looks as native as any desktop app. In June, in fact, we’ll have one huge web ISV release a Titanium social desktop app to over 140 million people. They’re betting big on Titanium.

On the mobile side, we’ve gone the direct JS==>binding route. I can tell you with 100% certainty that the apps that are coming out over the next 3 weeks are produced by some of the largest companies in the world, for some of the biggest brands that everyone will be familiar with.

Finally, in terms of learning Objective-C, I’d say that while you of course can do that, you will write the same app in about 20% of the time and across multiple platforms.

I’ll post links to these apps on this site as they’re released.

I agree, it seems Apple might want to put a stop to companies like Appcelerator. Wonder what the outcome will be over the coming weeks when they get clarification from Apple and if it will halt this run to stuff like this and phonegap.

This seems par for the course with Apple and for a site dedicated to web technologies I was kinda surprised to see this post, though I suppose most of you are using Macs and iPhones already so I guess that’s why.

I know the user base is no where near but I kinda thought that webOS would be a better mobile platform for this site to work with. Put all that HTML5 and Javascript knowledge to direct use rather than using middleware. The SDK works in Mac, Linux or Windows and Ares will let you make apps from within a browser.

I’ve read somewhere there is a way to get around these rules.

As i understand SDK’s like Unity3d doesn’t compile stuff but rather creates a “ready-to-compile” xCode project. That could be the loophole that SDK’s like Titanium are rooting for.

Agreed, but i don’t think Nettuts is the place for tuts on how to build non-web applications for mobile devices. Web-applications however would be a good idea.

I personally would btw not be using a 3rd party / private framework. Knowing Apple they will apps from Titanium and some others (except for Flash of course ;) ) and then kick them out of the appstore 3 or 4 months down the road. That means you’d have to completely start over.

Unless Titanium finds a way to compile in to a XCode project so a developer could then build the with XCode, which basically bypasses Apples new TOS.