A small query regarding appcelerator titanium? - mobile

i'm planning on working with titanium.
i want to know if "Same origin policy" can be eliminated by using titanium.
are there any drawbacks in titanium?
please recommend some cross-platforms..
please do leave some suggestions..
Thank you,

SOP is especially used for HTTP. So it doesn't concern titanium since it only use javascript as "local" language that is "translated" into xcode. at the end you got an simple xcode-project and an .app file.
i use it for a quite complex app and it works fine. i needed adding some features as module written in objC since the framework isn't as ongoing concering the iphone API as the native objC, but that worked out fine.

Since you are asking for the drawbacks of Titanium.. here it is..
I would not say that it's cross platform. Even my android app will look different in my Mac compared to the one developed in Windows.
Not all functions will work on Android and iPhone. Some will partially work on the other.
Ti is a biased and Android Developer are always left behind.
Also, if you are developing an Android app like me, you will be facing a lot of problems and Kitchen Sink will not always work. Android development in Ti is very bad and expect to find a lot of bugs.
Contacts API is not even complete as of now (Version 1.60) . I can't even get the contacts email and phone number!
No Bluetooth support
I spent a lot of hours "debugging" and waiting for the emulator rather than serious coding.
API refence and the QA will help a bit but there are more questions than answers.
Ti doesn't even have a proper debugging features as well as IDE. Make sure to dedicate a lot of hours in knowing how it works. I have a hard time finding a good resources to start.
Memory Problem and Leaks are very common.
Gradients will not work in Android (use image instead)
and last thing, Documentation really sucks!
(but still I love Ti despite all of the above)

Related

Use Adobe Flash/AIR VOIP in Winforms

Since there are no answers yet, I'm going to rewrite this question in hopes of an answer (I don't mind discussion, but I know SO is about Q&A). It appears security checks/prompts make it unfeasible to use Flash Player. With this in mind, the question still stands, but please answer based on experience using AIR.
I have a Winforms app written in C# that I need to add VOIP to. I really like how well the Flash Player VOIP solution works, the AEC (echo cancel) is awesome. I know they use Speex, but the implementation is still a lot of work even using Speex, so I'd like to use Adobe's solution directly in my app.
Has anyone done this? What issues will I have? A few I can think of:
IPC between AIR and Winforms app. I assume this is easy and several options, including sockets/network, file i/o, maybe others.
Based on this
Content running in the AIR application sandbox does not need the
permission of the user to access the microphone
I don't think security warnings will be an issue? I'm not sure what a sandbox is yet, but as long as my AIR app can run in this and still talk with my winforms app, then shouldn't be an issue.
I assume the voice capture including enhancements (AEC, NS, Speex, etc) are supported in AIR?
Are there any samples I can run that use voice capture in AIR?

tumblr mobile not working with prettify.js

So I wired in Prettify.js and Prettify.css into my new Tumblr blog. It works out great in chrome, IE, and Firefox but I was astonished when I went to my Android Phone and suddenly the code inside ... looks like an atrocity.
I was about to go digging but figured before I spend hours trying to solve a problem someone else already fixed I would see if my ol' Stack Buddies have anything to say on the matter.
aquamoogle.tumblr.com
Any solutions will be greatly appreciated and if none are posted I'll likely toss up a solution by the end of the weekend.
Clarification EDIT This is viewing the post through the Tumblr Android application. I don't think it has anything to do with phone version but because someone is bound to ask it's a Motorola Droid Bionic running Android 2.3.4
Alrighty, since nobody came along with this one I'll throw the answer out there. The Tumblr application after decompiling it off the APK does not use a standard web frame. This means that javascript execution is not embedded in the view for the mobile application.
Sucks I know... Another possible solution would be to use straight CSS for formatting but alas this doesn't even work in the mobile version as the CSS sheets are overridden with mobile style sheets for more compact formatting.
So this one goes down as "unsolvable" due to the mobile application not operating within the same boundaries as the web driven blog does.
If someone does by chance have a solution to this that will work however, I would be interested in hearing it but at this time I don't have a valid solution. But, it's good to know.

Silverlight for the masses, is it time

We are launching a site that is media heavy and looking at using silverlight, since most of our video library is in wmv and from what i understand flash serving still costs a couple bucks.
Is silverlight really adopted out there, I know i use it as well as a bunch of developers for internal apps but as far as a web application is it ready to go, i went through a mac install with safari and had to restart my whole browser to install it, not exactly a great user experience. I also noticed that MS doesnt even use it for http://video.msn.com and also the few sites that have launched get crazy MAC people crying bloody murder , read http://www.itwriting.com/blog/641-mac-users-refusing-to-install-silverlight.html where one New York Times reader said "Nope. Not going to use anything from Microsoft. If reading the NYT requires MS products then, for this reader, goodbye NYT." when asked to install silverlight for NYT site. Tech wise moving forward I like Silverlight and some of the things i can do from a framework / wpf perspective and want to move ahead with it just not sure it's the out there enough yet.
Just wondering what people think out there
I think that if you have a user base that refuses to upgrade from Internet Explorer 6, good luck with getting anything else adopted, including Silverlight.
The thing can be installed more or less automatically just like Flash, for crying out loud. How difficult could it be?
The argument up to now has been, "Flash is already installed on most computers, so it already has high adoption." But that's a chicken and egg problem. How did Flash get adopted in the first place?
The NYT reader just has a prejudice. Clearly he believes that Microsoft is the evil empire. There's really nothing you can do about that. The real question is, how prevalent is this attitude? Certainly it will be common among the Linux/open source crowd, but it's hard for me to believe that this attitude would be prevalent among the average user. If anything, the Microsoft name is a warm and fuzzy for them.
I personally think Silverlight will pick up pace on business applications just because it's much programmer friendly and the fact that you can program it in .NET languages means it is much easier to reuse and maintain your business logic.
However, in terms of consumer application I don't think it can beat Flash, who's got a much larger install base and already used by most major companies. Also, don't forget HTML5, which now has integrated video element supported by major browsers including Firefox, Chrome and Safari.
Despite codec arguments, it is another strong contender, which will squeeze Silverlight's market share even further.
As a user and as a web developer I like sticking to the bare minimum. Like it or not Flash has pretty much become the standard platform for rich media on the internet. Everyone I know has flash to use videos from common sources like You Tube.
Since money seems to be an issue I might suggest Flowplayer, an open source Flash video player. Currently it only supports mpg, mov, and avi, but it's fairly easy to convert wmv to other formats using open source tools.
Here is Flowplayer:
http://flowplayer.org/v2/player/index.html
Here are some simple instructions for converting video:
http://flowplayer.org/v2/tutorials/my-movies.html
The only major sites using silverlight are ones that microsoft either owns, or has paid to use it, and most of the ones that they paid for switched back to flash. The version number may be approaching 3.0, but it is still a very new and immature platform that is not as widely installed as flash (which is pushing 97% of all browsers).
If you are talking wmv vs silverlight, I would go silverlight. If you are talking flash vs silverlight, I would say flash hands down. If you want to be forward thinking, serve stuff up with the HTML <video> tag, with flash as a fallback.
I remember that MLB went from showing those games from silverlight back to flash due to a few issues that didn't get resolve. It work pretty well on the Olympics, but beyond that I can't say how good or bad it is. Do you have any idea what percentage of users have Silverlight installed for their browsers? That might be something to look at.
I've heard that desktop Silverlight penetration is around 30%. Flash is somewhere north of 95%.
Going with Flash seems the easy decision now. I can certainly imagine a lot of Mac users seeing the "install Silverlight" message and saying, "Ick! No!"
In the long run, probably most Windows PCs will have Silverlight. Diehard Mac fans may never install it.
Meanwhile, I've seen more and more people who don't install Java, and who just pass on any site that says to install Java.
Adobe's only weakness now is mobile. They seem to have desktop locked up tight.

Will plug-ins such as Flash, Silverlight, etc. eventually replace XHTML/CSS/Javascript?

I've been developing with XHTML, CSS and Javascript for about 4 years now.
I love it a lot and hate it a little. I've looked into Flash and Silverlight a bit, but as a developer, I'm not too keen on them.
One reason is that they lock you into a vendor and generally, into using that vendor's tools. E.g. Adobe Flash or Microsoft Visual Studio, etc.
Also, Silverlight seems to mix content, layout/styling and behavior and into a single markup language, whereas I like the XHTML way of separating them out in code, but bringing them together in the user's web browser.
I also applaud the usability of the web, e.g. back button, hyperlinks, etc. which are set-in-stone standards that people are used to dealing with.
However, I'm seeing a lot of industry support for Silverlight and Flash. As far as .NET Developer jobs, I'm seeing less jobs for front-end/.NET developers and more jobs for Silverlight/.NET developers.
Will HTML developers still be employable in the future, or should I consider moving to a proprietary platform such as Silverlight?
While Flash/Silverlight skills may be worth developing, I think you will find that general web development skills will still be required for some years to come. Mobile apps in particular seem to place more emphasis on good, basic web design without dependence on plugins and or client-side code. Eventually, I would expect web standards to evolve to subsume the best (or at least most used) features of proprietary plugins. The web, at least, seems to be a place where people tend to favor solutions that maintain independence over lock-in to specific vendor technologies.
No, I think that idea will never fully catch on. The problem is really about the platform being developed on.
Look at how accessible the web is. Almost any machine can get on the web. My phone, my iPod, my laptop, my 11 year old PII machine, my gaming tower, all can access the same web.
The devices I have are not the limit to what can reach the web either. I think just about every gaming platform and cell phone can get on the web, as well as thin terminals running any OS imaginable. I'm sure there are others also.
The big thing looks like it's going to be the mobile market in the next few years. Some mobile devices can run flash, but it isn't used much because of the poor support & performance. The only way that the mobile web can work is by using pure standards based solutions, because that's really the only baseline that can be trusted to exist.
No matter what proprietary technologies come out, I can always rely on the fact that my XHTML pages will still render successfully on whatever device decides to access it. The same can't be said for flash or silverlight.
At the same time, I can also guarantee you that there will be a bigger market for flash and silverlight because the web is becoming more "media rich" in some niche markets (YouTube, Adobe Air, Hulu, Google Gears, etc. to name a few examples). There will absolutely be a market for it, but I wouldn't say it will defeat XHTML and web standards because the web is constantly being redefined.
No matter how much Flash or Silverlight try to take on, the technology will move so fast that the only baseline that I think will remain will be standards like XHTML and CSS.
Flash has been around for years and still hasn't taken over. I think that is one good example of how hard it is to replace XHTML.
Go for server-side development of any kind, but I wouldn't become a Silverlight or Flash specialist.
<CrystalBallMode>
To be honest I can't see it happening. Other than the reasons mentioned by tvanfosson and DanHerbert, the XHTML + CSS + JS stack just grew mature enough so that things like AJAX and jQuery make pretty much all the lightweight client side stuff easy with these tools (as opposed to things like streaming video, heavy computations or sockets etc.)
Common technological inertia will just guarantee that the existing things will stay around. People are much more likely to use something that has been around for a while and has been extended to meet the latest requirements than to use something totally new. Of course there are great paradigm shifts every now and then like the native to managed code transition but I don't see that happening with Flash or Silverlight.
</CrystalBallMode>
My hope is that what comes out of all of this is a new standardized web platform truly suited to building the web applications that people want to see with tools that developers really want to use. I see all of the effort going to trying to shoehorn these legacy web technologies into the "Web 2.0" model and I just wish that this effort could go towards making a truly revolutionary "Web v.Next".
Don't get me wrong, I really like what jQuery is doing to make Javascript client code easier, but it's still Javascript and my personal preference is to work with strongly typed languages with productive development tools.
In the meantime, I think tools like Silverlight and Flash have a lot to offer and help you do things more easily in some cases than in other web technologies, and there are some things you simply can't do any other way. But I don't think Silverlight or Flash or any other technology is the end game, just a step in the right direction.
Consider for a moment that you can manipulate a web page using Javascript, (X)HTML, and CSS with a great deal of overlap in functionality and yet ALL three technologies remain in prominent use today. The reason for this is because all three languages are different tools meant to solve different problems and no one of them can serve as an adequate replacement for the other.
Its the same thing with Flash / Silverlight vs these existing web technologies. In fact, I work in a dev shop that builds Flash based e-learning. One of our current products was originally built to use a purely Flash-based solution for navigation, etc. However, as the product has continued to evolve we have actually moved a lot of the functionality from the Flash-based e-learning module and into regular html pages.
In other words, I don't think that we'll be abandoning the current tools that web developers use any time soon. For the most part I see Flash / Silverlight as additional tools that will solve particular problems better than we were able to solve them previously.
Neither one is going to win out anytime soon. I expect which one is used will depend entirely on the purpose for many years to come.
The reason you're seeing so many job offerings for Silverlight of late is because it's a relatively new technology and just recently gained some momentum.
Though, I do expect Silverlight to make quick work of Flash.
I sure hope so. And yes, I think they will. There will be some development on legacy (XHTML/CSS/JS) apps for re-tuning purposes, but I think there will come a day when new apps are simply not created on those platforms.
Mobile phones are the issue right now. Flash isn't available on many of the major phone models. And their browsers are all over the map. Luckily there's Webkit (iPhone and G1).
If Silverlight makes it to a web platform then it will be a nice viable alternative to the hodgepodge of technologies that are currently in use. FYI, Microsfoft says Silverlight on Android is very possible. On the iPhone, hard to say, Apple is weird about such things.
AOL recently created a RIA version of it's email client in Silverlight. Looks nice and there's no Javascript errors to worry about. From a developer standpoint, that's huge.

Is NetBiscuits any good?

Has anybody got any real world stories build mobile web sites with NetBiscuits?
Someone told me it was the next big thing in mobile development (http://www.netbiscuits.com/home) and it looks pretty good from their site. Just wondered if anybody (besides them) has actually used it.
From a few months time working with it, I can say that they're indeed one of the best (if not the best) out there. The support is also insanely quick and good.
Only thing making me stop using it is the price. Especially if you're a small company and want to use their POI feature.
However I have yet to find a good replacement. May end up rolling my own version...
Edit: Related question.
They have created an entire xml (bml) based markup language that emulates html that has a very steep learning curve. I would seriously reconsider using it.
I have seen it working nicely. It also supports ASP.NET controls SDK that can be used to write ASP.NET app from Visual Studio. Once this app is deployed on your premise, you can use live bridge agent to connect this app to a Live Bridge server that Net Biscuits hosts. Your app is called a backend app in this case. This is a very useful feature when you do want to have Forms capability in your app and also want it to be accessible on NetBiscuits platform.
Check http://kb.netbiscuits.com/tactile/edc/livebridge_help.html. BiscuitML is also easier to grasp.
Look out for performance issues though. Customers in Australia have had response time issues - probably due to the Cloud Platform being located in USA/UK.

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