Sencha Touch 2 Allows Developers to Code iOS Apps With Windows PCs | Hacker News Reader

Sencha Touch 2 Allows Developers to Code iOS Apps With Windows PCs

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33 pointswerencole15 comments

> 'Sencha Touch 2 Allows Developers to Code iOS Apps With Windows PCs'

Stupid title. It's been a JS framework all along, it obviously can be coded on Windows/Linux.

I got the point though, Sencha Touch aims to look as native as possible. Well, that is really far fetched. I am working on a Sencha app, and Sencha Touch sucks. Especially the Sencha Touch docs are BS, single line descriptions, very pissing off.

But no other framework is as good as it, yet. Stuck with it for now.

No the title is correct, you can now create an iOS IPA for the App Store on Windows.

Did you encounter any other issues apart from the bad documentation? We're considering Sencha Touch for a new project and - as you said - no other framework seems to be as good as it.

I tried Sencha Touch. Light years better than JQuery Mobile and other platforms. But I agree - documentation is HORRIBLE. Both the standard ones and the ones you find in forums - hardly anyone discussing their problems in StackOverflow also. It was so horrible I decided to cut my losses and just make a native app.

Same here. The doc provided contains very few working examples. Support on forums is nearly non-existent. They have good tutorials videos but once you start adding functionality it hits the fan. I originally wanted to save dev time but unless you're making a static app, or a RSS feed you better go with java or objective-c.

Oh dear... I'm looking forward to build a prototype soon then. Indeed when searching through their forums for a spreadsheet style grid component I found plenty of unanswered topics.

Yes I'd like to go native too. It would make plenty of things much easier. But given our limited (human) resources it's just not an option for now. We just can't afford developing for both iOS and Android. Even though barely no-one's going to use the Android version (it's a tablet app), it's much better from a marketing point of view to say that we're supporting both.

If you just want to hook-up an API to a view it will do the job. You can check this, its supposed to be the best apps done w/ SenchaTouch so far > http://www.sencha.com/apps/

I use PhoneGap/SenchaTouch to push apps to Appstore and Android market.

Major problem with sencha is it all seems merry initially, then one day you wake up and realize you are in deep shit. Bugs crop up out of nowhere, you WILL have to find work-around solutions.

I heard the official Sencha team is pretty much unresponsive, they mostly concentrate on serving paid clients.

Performance was very poor initially, but its ok now.

Sencha Touch team concentrates so much on iOS, that it is relatively very poor in Android. Just beats the reason to use a cross-platform platform.

They told me specifically that Android was a priority for this release. Wonder how much better it is.

The best thing to do is, download their demos and hack them.

But if you are looking for a clean solution, then go native, mobile web still sucks. (I so wish it dint)

So, we spent time with device manufacturers understanding their implementations of WebKit and what we ended up doing is building specific implementations of our core performance APIs for each specific platform.

This is the problem with Android in a nutshell. Having to tune an HTML framework for each platform is just nuts.

The important question is: have the fixed their awful documentation and clunky demo apps?

Some of the demo apps are better, some basically the same. Overall improvement, I would say but kind of subjective.

"The new layout engine in Sencha Touch 2.0 is so fast we had to use a high speed camera to measure it." source http://vimeo.com/30296006. Read "the improvement is so tiny you couldn't see it, so we slowed it down for you to see". The responsiveness on Android was horrible (check forums). Seems like the only real improvement so far.

the v2 docs look better: http://docs.sencha.com/touch/2-0/

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