I’ve just come across one of the best new products for mobile development: Appcelerator’s Titanium – create, test and distribute native mobile apps using html, javascript and css. Not only does Titanium really lower the bar for mobile application development for web developers, it compiles them natively for the iPhone and Android. You essentially write one application that can be deployed across multiple platforms. I’ve only played with it for a few hours, watched some videos and read their Apis and it is extremely impressive. The UI is very intuitive and besides learning their javascript framework there is no additional work required. Even though it is good practice you don’t need to separate the html, javascript and css since the code is compiled for the appropriate platform. The result – it looks and behaves just like any other native app.
For a while i’ve been wanting to develop an application or two for the iPhone. It was pretty much the reason i bought my first macbook that i’m now typing on. But, learning objective-c and the XCode IDE were always deterrents to my moving forward with development. I’ve been concentrating on improving my user experience skills and wanted to work more on front end technologies than i have in the past. That’s one reason why learning objective-c has been lower down on my priority list and i haven’t come up with another pointless app for the 100k strong app store.
With Titanium though, the bar has once again been lowered for anyone (web devs) to contribute to a bloated app store. The projects i work on have a high demand on front end development, so developing using web technologies to build a native app is a god send for me.
If you’re a web developer who has resisted creating native mobile apps head over to Appcelerator right now and give Titanium a try. Watch the intro video and see just how cool this is:
Zero To App Module 0: What Can You Do? from Appcelerator Video Channel on Vimeo.
Oh, and did i mention it is free?
Appcelerator’s CEO/founder is Jeff Haynie – @jhaynie. Be sure to follow him and get updates on a very polished product.
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