2 Days in the Valley
Yes, the developer/blogger with no allegiance to any mobile platform has finally found a home. I spent 2 days in Silicon Valley at Appcelerator HQ meeting the crew and getting to know more about them. In that time I had the pleasure of speaking with Tony Guntharp, Jeff Haynie, Scott Schwarzhoff, Kevin Whinnery, Matt Apperson, and Anthony Decena. Needless to say, I was VERY impressed by them as individuals and as a team.
As it turns out, although I’ve been very critical as of late regarding Appcelerator, they respected the concerns I brought forth. They actually seemed to view them as a blessing in disguise. For every loudmouth like me there’s 100 who make no mention of their issues with the platform.
Major efforts are currently underway to make Appcelerator even more developer friendly. If you have not heard yet, as of the 1.2.0 release of Titanium Studio, integrated mobile debugging is now free. As you might have guessed, this was a big talking point between me and the Appcelerator guys in light of the less than complimentary post I wrote regarding their initial charging for it, which has since been ammended.
In addition to free debugging, Appcelerator has made a copious amount of training videos free for developers. As a compliment to their existing API documentation, wiki, and Q&A section, these videos are more than just a quick start. They deal in depth with coding conventions and best practices for developing high quality Appcelerator apps.
So where do I fit in? I will be in the role of a Platform Evangelist. Yeah, I know, sell out. But hey, at some point you need to pick a horse and commit. And in the advent of the incredible popularity of DOM-less Javascript (see Node.js) and mobile development, it only made sense to pick the platform that is championing both. Plus, with the brief look I got under the hood of Appcelerator’s operations, I see nothing but exciting things coming, things I would love to be part of.
Things to Come
What does this mean for the content of my blog? Not sure yet, but don’t count on it turning into Appcelerator-only love-fest. There’s just too many other things I’m interested in. Obviously much of my work will be geared towards Appcelerator and showing off what it can do. In doing so, though, I’ll fortunately have plenty of opportunities to demonstrate native Android and iOS code, code that can then be turned into Appcelerator modules. Yes, it is a very interesting time indeed.
Stay tuned…