2013-05-20

First Impressions Using MoSync and Appcelerator's Titanium Cross-Platform Mobile Development Tools

Last week, I did some background research into which was the best cross-platform mobile development tools. I looked over many different SDKs and have all my notes in my other blog post: http://blog.simplyadvanced.net/cross-platform-mobile-development-tools/

Today, I spent time installing both MoSync and Titanium. Then, I tried to create a basic "Hello, World!" program with them. These results have a clear winner.

Background:
I am running the free version of both programs on Windows 7 (64-bit). I only tested developing Android applications at this juncture. iOS development requires a Mac for both of them (also according to Apple licences: "can only compile and publish from an Apple device").

MoSync:
Within five minutes of installing their MoSync SDK and Eclipse-based IDE, I had a sample app running on my Android (4.0) device and felt very confident it would also easily run on other platforms. There were no problems, I was pleasantly surprised. Tip: I used http://www.mosync.com/documentation/manualpages/getting-started-html5-and-javascript

Appcelerator's Titanium:
First, the installation process took about 4 times longer and took many more steps than I thought necessary. The Android emulator didn't want to run because Titanium installed itself in a sub-directory of "Titanium Studio" and couldn't access the directory itself because there was a space in its name. So, I tried to run the sample application on my same Android device and after 30 minutes of "pre-compiling" it seemed that Titanium crashed (infinite loop). Titanium's getting started guide: http://docs.appcelerator.com/titanium/latest/#!/guide/Quick_Start

Conclusion:
MoSync's first impression is fantastic for developers. Users are able to see results very quickly.

Keep in mind, this was only a test in first impressions so far. Very important, but nevertheless, I will still be experimenting with both MoSync and Titanium as the summer goes on and be posting about my experiences.

Source

~ Simply Advanced ~



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