Hi, I'm the CTO for RAVN. When we decided to jump into the mobile dev game no one in our company had any experience with Object C or Android dev. We knew we wanted an iPhone app for sure, and probably an Android app eventually. I had taken a brief look at Objective C previously, and coming from Ruby/Rails, it looked less than trivial (memory management?! I hadn't done that in 10 years). I had heard about frameworks that would allow us to use JavaScript to write our app, and also allow for cross-platform development, so I started researching.
I looked at PhoneGap and Titanium primarily. We ended up going with Titanium for a few reasons:
- As you may or may not know, PhoneGap works by creating a sort of Safari "wrapper" that lets you write your app in HTML5 and JS. But the performance is crappy relative to native rendering. Titanium also used to work the same way, but more recently it actually compiles code written in JavaScript to native Obj C and Java. Clearly the benefit is speed.
- Even though Titanium only supports iOS and Android, we didn't really plan on ever developing for other platforms (e.g. Windows Phone, BlackBerry, webOS).
If you're looking into developing a mobile app, I would recommend taking a look at Titanium. To be fair, I had to write a little Obj C to hack geofencing functionality into Titanium (if you're interested in that: http://stevenou.com/post/17623116547/how-to-hack-geofencing-...).
There were lots of pros and cons to using Titanium and I'd be happy to answer any questions.
I looked at PhoneGap and Titanium primarily. We ended up going with Titanium for a few reasons:
- As you may or may not know, PhoneGap works by creating a sort of Safari "wrapper" that lets you write your app in HTML5 and JS. But the performance is crappy relative to native rendering. Titanium also used to work the same way, but more recently it actually compiles code written in JavaScript to native Obj C and Java. Clearly the benefit is speed.
- Even though Titanium only supports iOS and Android, we didn't really plan on ever developing for other platforms (e.g. Windows Phone, BlackBerry, webOS).
If you're looking into developing a mobile app, I would recommend taking a look at Titanium. To be fair, I had to write a little Obj C to hack geofencing functionality into Titanium (if you're interested in that: http://stevenou.com/post/17623116547/how-to-hack-geofencing-...).
There were lots of pros and cons to using Titanium and I'd be happy to answer any questions.