“(…) Wunderlist is now native – smaller, faster and more stable.”
Matthew Bostock, 6Wunderkinder’s blog

Translated, Wunderlist got rid of TM’s biggest problems:

• Size: even the smallest “Hello World” app weights at least 1.5MB (this is still huge in the mobile world – do the same thing using native Java and the app will only weight a few KB);
• Speed: TM for Android slow. This is mainly due to the fact that TM for Android is using Mozilla’s Rhino as its javascript interpreter, written in Java, running inside Dalvik’s VM, and not compiled to native ARM, as google’s V8, SpiderMonkey or any JS engine written in C or C++ would;
• Stability: this one is not really, in my opinion, TM’s fault. Due to the fact that Javascript is dynamic language, and Titanium does not compile or even do any proper syntax check, the quality of the code is probably to blame here.

Appcelerator reacted two days after 6Wunderkinder’s announcement, stating that Titanium Mobile for Android will use, somewhere in the future, google’s V8 engine. This comes, however, with a still significant drawback: only devices running Android 2.2 or newer support android’s NDK, and therefore the natively compiled V8 Engine. According to Appcelerator’s own benchmarks, this will at least double the performance. Remains to be seen if the “Size” problem will be solved: V8′s binaries will still be inside the app’s package…

(…) As the mobile enterprise continues to boom and hardware complexity grows with a wide range of platforms, devices and audiences, there is no doubt that HTML5 will skyrocket in adoption. HTML5 Web-based apps offer the developer a “write one, run many” solution, addressing the many demands of today’s immediacy for remote communication, along with enhanced modern media capabilities that have become of increasing importance to both business and consumer.

Complete article on WirelessWeek.com.

My requirements are:

• Native UI components must be used – maintaining the native look and feel for each platform is important (PhoneGap is out of the picture because of this);
• The same code base (or at least most of it) must be used in all platforms;
• The UI must scale well between Phone and Tablet formats and screen densities (DPI);
• The application must perform smoothly, speedwise, even in lower end devices;
• Some access to the device’s hardware: GPS, sensors, camera.

I have found some platforms so far:

• Titanium Mobile: this is my current number one, but i don’t think Windows Phone 7 will be supported. Plus, the Android implementation is a bit clumsy: the JavaScript core is not interpreted by the OS, so a java JS interpreter is included- this makes the application big and slow. In iOS this problem does not exist, as the system’s javascript interpreter is used. On the plus side, native UI components are supported and a very nice, Eclipse based, IDE is provided;
• PhoneGap: this one also uses JavaScript, but is completely HTML/JS based: the application runs inside a WebView, and has no bindings to native UI components, it relies on third-party JS libraries to build the UI, such as Sencha Touch or jQuery Mobile. It’s a browser on steroids basically, and doesn’t float my boat.
• RhoMobile: haven’t tested or reviewed this one yet, opinions anyone?

So, i need your opinion about these or other development tools: are they any good? Have you used them in a project? Comment below.

The problem

Normally, Titanium has to compile the entire titanium class library, then “dex” it and package all your app’s js files and resources and push it inside the emulator so you can test it – and this happens every time you change something in your app. The problem here is… this is slow, really slow. This fact alone almost drove me off Titanium Mobile, in favour of other, friendlier, platforms.

Using Fastdev

First download a recent nightly build of Titanium Mobile SDK (latest 1.7.x or 1.8.0) – more details in this previous post.

Now, the tricky part. This feature is still in beta, so there is no fancy UI integration inside Titanium Studio, and we need to do everything “by hand”.

First, add the 1.8.0 SDK folder to your system environment’s PATH (if you don’t know how to do this, click here). After this, in the command shell, go to your application’s folder and type:

start /B titanium fastdev start

This will start a new server that will send all the .js files and resources to your app, running in the emulator (according to Appcelerator, using fastdev on devices will be available soon). The files served are logged into this terminal window, so keep it open and visible, to check what is happening under the hood.

After this, just run the app on the emulator, as always, but do it only ONCE – if you need to update your app, don’t recompile: just close it inside the emulator and run it again – it will download all the resources from the fastdev server started above!

And that’s it, much faster and less painful… unless you are targeting honeycomb; but here the problem is that the emulator is, I think officially, the slowest emulator in the world.

Update: fastdev is already available inside the latest Titanium Studio – update it ASAP

- http://builds.appcelerator.com.s3.amazonaws.com/mobile/master/mobilesdk-1.8.0-20110513115704-win32.zip is the latest for windows at this moment. To install, just unzip it inside your Titanium SDK folder (this should be, in Windows, %ProgramData%\Titanium – in my case, this translates to C:\ProgramData\Titanium); The ZIP already has the required folder structure (mobilesdk\win32\[version]\etc..), so just unzip it there and everything will be fine.

If you are already using Titanium Studio, use the “Help” -> “Install Titanium SDK from URL” and paste the full URL to the ZIP file you have selected from the nightly builds. I prefer the method above, as this option, sometimes, doesn’t unzip the full contents of the updated SDK.

Appcelerator has made no official announcement on 1.8.0, so I have no idea what is new, but keep in mind: this is a beta release, and should not be used in production apps.

Here is the uploaded javascript header file, updated for Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile version 1.5.1. This can be used with Eclipse+Aptana’s autocomplete, using the method described by James David Low a while back.

I haven’t tried it yet, I’m using notepad++ still, but I’ll give it a go ASAP!

Original post from Appcelerator’s developer blog:

Tonight, we pushed the latest 1.3 update to distribution servers. You should be getting an update notification inside Titanium Developer if you haven’t already. It’s been a little over 4 weeks since our last release. We had promised to get out 1.3 before the end of May and we’re a little earlier than expected.

The 1.3 release included over 120+ fixes for both Android and iPhone/iPad. The Android team won the most bug fixes in this release clocking in 63 bug fixes to iPhone’s 61. Go Android! For a full list of all the changes, please see the Change Log. Great job to Don, Bill and Marshall for all the hard work on Android. We still have a ways to go to where we want with Android but we’re iterating quickly now. We also have some very exciting Android features coming soon.

This release does have one major notable item worth talking about here (we detailed more of the specifics in the Change Log). With 1.3 and iPhone/iPad, we now are generating full source as part of the XCode project created at project setup. This change provides several benefits in terms of ensuring that we’re in continued compliance with Apple’s Terms of Service, making it easier for debugging or environmental issues we sometimes run into and making it easier to export a project to another machine (useful for agency/development partners).

The updated the Kitchen Sink distribution for 1.3 and it can be downloaded either from github or in a zip distribution. For 1.3, we’ve also started a basic Kitchen Sink for iPad.

What’s next?

As soon as we finish one release, we’ve already begun the next – in some cases before the final release is out the door. The next release is expected to be 1.4 and should be released to the community in June. For 1.4, we’ll continue to focus primarily on maintenance issues, API parity for Android and full API support for the upcoming iPhone 4.0 OS.

We’ll be pushing the first drop for the Blackberry SDK very soon now that 1.3 is out the door. Blackberry work has been progressing in parallel and we hope to release it within the next couple of weeks to Professional/Enterprise subscribers and Partners. We anticipate the full community release of Blackberry will be late Summer. If you’re not currently a subscription customer and would like to get access to Blackberry, please signup here.

Developer Site Updates

We’re making a number of major improvements to the Developer website and hope to release them in waves over the next month. Besides a number of nagging issues/bugs that have been reported, we’re also improving site search, introducing a new forum-based discussions and rolling out a new help desk for subscription customers.

Desktop Plans

Many have asked why Mobile releases faster than Desktop. This is a good question and let me address it. Desktop has been a slightly more mature product and has been adopted by some rather very large companies (as long as a ton of projects from tiny to large). We’re continuing to make substantial investments in Desktop and will be having a big update in the summer for Desktop.

Module SDK

Quite a number of developers have used the current iPhone Module SDK to extend Titanium. In 1.4, we’re planning on introducing the new Android Module SDK. We’re also hard at work on a new product we’re calling Marketplace that relates to modules for mobile, tablet and desktop. If you’re interested in extending Titanium with your own unique stuff, please let us know.

Tooling

We have some new significant updates to the Titanium tooling in the works – including debugger support. Expect a refresh of the current tooling with massive improvements in the early Summer timeframe.

Improved Documentation

We continue with each release to improve the API reference documentation. However, we know we’ve got a long way to go to better documentation. We’ve been working with a professional training company to produce our first set of programming guides and I’m pleased to say that we’ve almost finished the first new Getting Started Guide. The guide will be much more comprehensive and will be the first of many new Guides we’ll be producing over the next few months.

Training

We’re very close to launching a new comprehensive, professionally produced AppU video training series. Our plan is to release new video content every month much like we do software. The training will include not only on-demand video based courseware, but also guides and sample code. Stay tuned for more updates.

Community Growth

The last 4 months have been a whirlwind for the Appcelerator team and we’re very proud of our accomplishments and all of the great applications that are being built from all over the world. Nothing makes us more happy than to hear about all the cool applications that you’re building every day. Thank you for sharing them with us.

With all of this growth, comes challenges that we’re trying to meet. In the past 4 weeks, we’ve had numerous website outages as we hurried to upgrade our Amazon AWS infrastructure to handle the growth. We think we’re now ready for the next wave of growth from a infrastructure standpoint. We’ve also found more places where we could add high-availability and load-balancing as well as invested in better monitoring tools.

We’ve also welcomed four new developers to the Appcelerator team in the past 2 weeks – all of which came directly from our community and who are passionate about what we’re trying to accomplish. With this we hope to be able to continue to accelerate development and make Titanium the best product available.

Thank you so much for your support, your passion and your patience as we continue on our journey together.

Codestrong!
Jeff