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Comment by jawngee | Hacker News Reader

    The iPad app we've been working on is currently 
    using a very useful plugin that can only be found 
    in the Appcelerator ecosystem. I shall be ripping 
    that out and finding some other solution to the 
    problem. There are plenty of competitors in this 
    space.

If you were writing a native app you wouldn't have to rip anything out or have to find it elsewhere. Just sayin'.

I have a fairly aggressive lack of sympathy for phonegap/titanium/"cheap shortcut" users in general and this whole incident is just sort of confirmation to part of the reason why.

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> I have a fairly aggressive lack of sympathy for phonegap/titanium/"cheap shortcut" users in general

They're fulfilling a need that is the same as someone who customizes WordPress or builds on top of Drupal - people who want custom software, but can't afford it.

If the tools didn't work, then they wouldn't be used as much as they are, and if there was no demand for cheap mobile development with compromises, then the tools wouldn't exist.

> If the tools didn't work, then they wouldn't be used as much as they are

The people who make the decision are not necessarily the ones who know what works and what doesn't. "It has to be HTML5" might just as well be the next "it must be object-oriented".

Phonegap has no such issues as it is now becoming an Apache project (see Apache Cordova). Before Apache I would have steered clear as well, for exactly the reasons you're mentioning.

Of course, a well-made native application will perform better, but PhoneGap can be quite smooth too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467826

As a bonus, you'll get to utilize your existing web development skills. Besides, quite a lot of the "native" apps I've seen utilize some webviews anyway.

A lack of sympathy would be appropriate if the developer was having problems with the app quality, reliability, performance, etc. then I think we might all be with you that you don't deserve sympathy for your app sucking because you took technical shortcuts.

But for a the vendor of development tools to start contacting my clients without my permission? That's ridiculous for them to even communicate with my clients, let alone try to get money.

meh, I don't think this has really got anything to do with "cheap shortcut" methods. this is about broken morals. But, with that said, my impression is that while there are a lot of downsides to using HTML5 for your app, there's a LOT of amazing things you can do with the UI that are much harder in Objective C, and it's a hell of a lot more affordable to contract HTML devs than it is Obj C devs. ;) And when you're bootstrapping an app that is a big deal.

Titanium isn't an HTML5 based app framework like Phonegap. It's a Javascript framework for building apps that use the native UI widgets.

My experience with titanium was really poor. Lots of silent fails with no real error output. Also I found it very limited, more limited than just opening a webview and using html5 really and hooking into it with code for the native functionality.

And horrible doc. Don't forget that!

The docs are pretty good, and the wiki is a wealth of information. where exactly are you looking?

You must be joking. I've built several projects, for pay, using Titanium and find it to be very powerful and fast for building even complex mobile apps. The customers have been thrilled that I'm able to deliver tons of features in shorter time frames and hence lower cost.

As for error output - you just need to look at the logs in detail (and turn them up to trace) to get details for hard crashed.

I built one project with it for pay. It is much more limited than a real native solution like obj-c, monotouch, etc.

What exactly would you do if the client came back to you and requested something titanium couldn't do?

When I was using it it had problems even moving to a page with a webview already loaded up to a webpage.

Have you built a project with a real native language for pay?

"there's a LOT of amazing things you can do with the UI that are much harder in Objective C"

I don't really agree with this. Can you provide an example?

Because there are a million things you can do in objective c with the ui that are basically impossible to do with html5, and many many ui elements you can configure 100x faster in obj-c(they also run 100x faster). Hell even having a reasonable 2 column lay out is surprisingly difficult in html/css.

With obj c/native if you are unhappy with some functionality of the ui you can very easily break into open gl and do pretty much anything you can imagine if you have the talent.

As far as I can tell the only real advantages of using html5 is that you can hit many platforms poorly with one code base, and that maybe you don't really know how to program or understand object oriented programming.

I would not say speed of making a ui is a plus for html unless you are trying to hit a bunch of platforms poorly or do not know the native languages well.

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