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Comment on Show HN: Our first iPhone app, built entirely in JavaScriptparent

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Titanium was a nightmare. The edit-compile-debug cycle is so slow. I ran back to ObjC after two weeks. Development is faster and the resulting apps are better.

It has good points too but for me it was a net negative. You couldn't insert rows into a table view without it crashing, you had to reload the entire thing (that was in May).

I'm amazed at the results some people get with Titanium. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I'm very familiar with web dev and found it intolerable.

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.

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