I subscribe to the TechZing podcast and the two hosts, Justin Vincent and Jason Roberts have used Appcelerator for a couple projects of theirs and talk about it in many of the older episodes.  I had tried Appcelerator on my old windows box and it was a disaster. Could have been them, could have been me – didn’t care.  Then I moved to Mac – and tried it.  I still had problems, think I even tweeted about that back in February.

Since I respect the guys from TechZing and with the on going praise, I figured I’d try it again.  I googled how to remove it completely from my mac, just to make sure the old broken / mis-configured stuff was gone, downloaded and installed it.

To my amazement, it installed easily, and I was able to quickly open Titanium Studio (essentially eclipse customized for Titanium) and run a new empty app.  Granted it wasn’t an exciting app, but it did open in the simulator.  After about 40 minutes of dinking around, I was able to get everything in order (thanks Apple) and deployed it to my iPhone.  Again, no awesomeness in that app, but still – a huge leap.  Titanium has an app called Kitchen Sink – where they add all of their features, and show off the framework.  I downloaded that, imported it, and was able to deploy that on my phone as well.  This rocked.  10 minutes later, I had it running in the Android simulator. It only took 10 minutes because I had to get the Android SDK stuff in order.

Within an hour of downloading, I had both created and imported apps, built them, tested them on the simulator and deployed them to my iPhone.  Amazing.

Appcelerator uses Javascript as a programming language, yea, not just a scripty thing you use on a webpage, as the language. Pretty cool.  The code gets compiled using the device SDKs so so the deployed app runs natively on the phone.  This gives you access to the device’s features like calendar, GPS, accelerometer, camera, video, photo libraries, file system etc.

I have yet to really start playing around with it, but I’m planning on building an app for a friend, so keep watching this blog for that.

All in all – when I can go from download to deployment on my device in about an hour, that rocks. Titanium Appcelerator gets an A+ from me. Thanks Justin and Jason for influencing me to try it again.

Code it right
theCodeDog