trabianmatt

My favorite variation of this is to have a special keystroke for saving a file and making the window transparent at the same time, then restoring the opacity on the next keystroke. I can see the effect of the live (or hot) reload and then either continue editing or cmd+tab to the browser if I need to interact with it.

I've enjoyed reading the "U.S. Financial Diaries": http://www.usfinancialdiaries.org/. I build online and mobile banking for credit unions and have been using the stories they've collected as a gut check to make sure we're keeping the low- to moderate-income households in mind.

Ours is Queen - We Are the Champions. This is how we know it's been a good day:

https://img.skitch.com/20120313-c4cbt33txej9m4nstkguycp45i.p...

One trick that really helped with the edit-compile-debug cycle, especially on iOS, was to run the app from the command line instead of using Titanium Studio. I set up a Rake task that would run the app and then listen for a timestamp change to tmp/restart.txt, at which point it would restart the app within seconds. I already had a vim command for touching that file (it's used by Passenger for a similar purpose) so all I do while developing is press a key combination and wait for the simulator to pop back up. Very fast.

With Android it's like testing 10 versions of IE6 -- every device/OS combo seems to behave differently.

Android development with Titanium was much easier when I started using a real device, but it's still much slower than iOS development.

I just released a native mobile banking app built using Titanium: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sf-fire-credit-union-mobile/i... and am happy to share my experiences with it.

The patterns and frameworks I use in single-page javascript apps carried over well to developing with Titanium, including tools such as Backbone and CommonJS. Titanium supports CommonJS directly now but it wasn't available when I started so I used Stitch to combine the code into a single javascript file and have been happy with the result. One bonus of using this approach is that I've been able to share a large portion of the code with the mobile web version of the app currently in development (using Backbone and jQuery Mobile).

While we ran into some problems that were difficult to track down, the code for Titanium is on GitHub and is easy to fork if you need to. For example, one thing that's prevented me from posting a link to this app previously is that the Android version (also built with Titanium) is experiencing frequent crashes on certain devices. After several (ok, 20+) hours of debugging I discovered that the problem was in the 'click' event handler on table rows -- the handler was passing the whole table row object in the event handler and was causing occasional crashes due to the size of that object. I didn't need that data to be passed in the events so I just commented out that portion of Titanium code and everything's great now (we're releasing an update shortly). Sure, it was a brutal bug to find, but the source was available and not too difficult to follow.

The app also includes custom modules written in Objective C for iOS and Java for Android, but only for very specific functionality that wasn't already included in Titanium -- 99% of what we needed was already available.

If there's any interest I'm thinking of extracting my pattern into a basic application that I can share with others and perhaps build a bit of a framework around it. Here's a gist as an example of code used in the app: https://gist.github.com/1832639

Edit: accidentally used a private gist.