As an opener I have been developing mobile apps using Apccelrator Titanium for the last 6 months and I am TCAD qualified and a community Titan. Prior to this I have been coding business applications for the last 20 years.
Well the intro over what is the purpose of this post.
As I was developing a rather large application, it became apparent that a code structure was required to remove duplication of code, reduce application size and increase the speed. So I looked around and found nothing.
We had already started the project by thinking about data transfer size, processing speed and usability so planning a code architecture was the next obvious step. Having been coding in flex for a while I had already used puremvc and applied various code architectures. But this was for mobile, where space, memory and speed are all critical factors so my thought process went down this route.
If I add a framework on top of a framework then I would be adding complexity and code for no real reason, I understand code abstraction so if I set it up right at the start I should be able to accomplish the goal. So this is what happened.
This series of blogs is to explain how I implemented an MVC architecture using code abstraction to develop an Augmented reality application within the Appcelerator Titanium Framework.
Articles in this series:
Part 1
Part 2
A strange thing happened as I was working yesterday.
I was contacted by Paul Dowsett from Appcelerator asking what I was doing on the 29th and 30th of November. Well I was planning on attending this …. London Titanium Group. Still am in fact 
Paul asked if I would like to attend the Apps World in London on those days, as they have a stand and would like it if I would help them man it…
So my response was Awesome. If your planning on coming to the Apps World come say hi to the Appcelerator folks, and get some info on an excellent cross platform mobile and desktop development framework.
I have used Adobe flex for quite a few years now, and one feature I liked was it worked. Sometimes not as well as I had hoped but it still worked.
It was also a supported commercial product which made it an easy sell to my employers and customers. But now they have turned it into open source which I am not surprised at, it means for me they have scraped flex. I had the feeling that something was brewing at Adobe for the last 6 months, but I had no idea they would basically turn a product which is used by 100o’s of companies to develop their business critical applications into an open source, unsupported product.
This is serious for lots of reasons, it now makes flex an unusable platform for development unless you are allowed to use open source platforms.. There are so many companies who aren’t. It means that these companies now have two options, change their policy (NOT LIKELY) or re-develop their applications in a different technology.
A different technology, well I don’t know of one. Guess thats not just me Flex filled a whole between developing for Web and Desktop simultaneously, it provided a platform for Rich Application Development which wasn’t and still isn’t available elsewhere. There are other technologies for developing desktop apps, and web apps, and mobile apps, but not one which caters for all three and handles the different OS’s.
So Adobe your decision on this is not something I understand. I am and have been involved in the Adobe community for a while, I am currently the UGM for the Sheffield group. I attend Adobe conferences and have been part of the team organising Flash Camps in the UK.
Well, I cannot say this will continue, I used Flex, I am not a designer, nor do I write games. I write business applications some specialised and Flex was my preferred platform, but as an open source platform I can’t use it. I now have to develop a HTML application (go back 10 years) and a separate desktop version(go back 5 years) and a separate mobile version.. Well that will increase development time and cost all round.
OH and wonderful that you bought the company behind PhoneGap, but guess you didn’t want PhoneGap as that is now open sourced to the Apache foundation. Yet another product which has become a very difficult sell to my clients.
I have been fortunate in that each project I work on we look at the technology and the current project has been developed in Appcelerator Titanium and just released to the app store. It was the right technology for the project. I won’t say what the customer has said about the Adobe announcements but lets just say it involved a lot of thank the £$%^$££@%^* we didn’t use Flex for this.
I have had the pleasure of working with some excellent people at Adobe and I am sorry that some of those have been the victim of the recent Job losses, it is never a happy time when so many people loose their jobs in one go, and I wish them all well for the future.
A final note… Adobe this is not good, it is not good for the community and businesses who have put their future into a proprietary platform which is now dead. The future will have to go on in another direction.
T…….
As my role has changed so have the conferences and technologies I need to attend and use. This year I have landed at the Full Frontal Conference in Brighton.
What geeks do when the speakers aren't talking
For those who haven’t heard of it, it is a 1 day conference about JavaScript organised by Remy Sharp and in its third year. OH and it’s not at the Brighton Dome.
This years date was the 11th November and seeing it started at 9 I came down the night before. This could have been a bit dull, but the local JavaScript user group had invited any attendees to there bi monthly meeting. Async was fun and I even managed to get a 5 minute presentation slot to get some excellent feed back on my latest project. Then strangely we went to the pub.
The group of people around are not the usual group I am used to, where at flash and Adobe conferences I know a lot of the attendees here I knew only a few. This was not a problem, the whole group are friendly chatty and really pleasant to be around, so a night of geeky and techie talk took place and I managed to bump into a few old friends.
But now onto the conference. Well the venue, yep excellent, it’s a theatre nice comfortable seats, free coffee (total win), and registration was a breeze. It’s not a huge conference but a couple of hundred people is not a small one either and it was full…. no empty seats. excellent job Remy and the team.
The speakers well it started with coffeescript…. by Jeremy Ashkenas who basically wrote coffeescript his presentation was not only well prepared but also extremely well presented, including getting down and dirty with the code.
Phil Hawksworth is the next up talking about Excessive Enhancement. The talk was excellent and again a lot of preparation was taken and executed with fun and professionalism.
You may notice I am not filling in details of the talks, well that’s what the conference is for.
Onto speaker three… yea … keeping my attention
Marijn Haverbeke talking on Respectable coding in the browser. Not something of which I am a big fan.. I prefer to be able to work offline, but it’s still really interesting to see the advancements and techniques for this method.
And we moved onto Rik Arends who gave a talk on the Cloud9 IDE. What a really great concept and worth a closer look. Presented with knowledge and interest.
LUNCH!!!!!!!
Lunch over we’re back in the venue and starting the afternoon session with Nicholas Zakas speaking on Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture… Oh I am so interested in this…. after coding the last project.
And now for Glenn Jones on Beyond the page…. @glennjones And the first setup slow down.. oh it’s not a Mac …. but what an excellent talk.
It’s time for Brendan Dawse and Beyond the Planet of the Geek…. Awesome. I have only tried for three years to get to see this guy speak and I wasn’t disappointed.
And finally Marcin Wichary You gotta do what you gotta do Google and yet more Google…. cool and geeky then it’s off to the party. whoop whoop, lots of geeky chat and networking.
The final thoughts, well if you can make it to Brighton next year and your interest is in the web and JavaScript this is an excellent conference for you to attend. It’s well organised, prepared and executed with interesting, relevant and up to date content.
Good job by all those involved.
T…..
Well it was about time I changed the warped website. Here is the new look and content to come on an ongoing basis.
I hope you like it, I will transfer older blog posts as soon as I can and start to build some nice tutorials, and hopefully useful information.
Well short and sweet.
Enjoy
T…..
It is now over for another year, but was Adobe Max worth the money. A simple answer is Yes but maybe not for the reasons which become immediately apparent.
Having coded flex for the last three years, mainly in companies where I was the only developer and being self taught I went to Max to consume, my itinerary was set accordingly. I had signed up for lots of hands on labs and specific technology talks.
But first came the Community summit. A day and evening for the UGM’s and ACP’s, the day itself was good with lots of content, well prepared and presented. Shame I was suffering Jet lag from the day before. The announcements started the theme of what was to come.
Monday was soon upon us and we found ourselves in the reserved seats in a good place in the theatre, as a UGM we even had our own entrance. The keynote was very carefully prepared and presented it managed to keep my attention for the whole two hours (a rarity). It contained lots of announcements, I have seen others posting about the specific’s relating to the individual products.
The main theme of the whole event is Adobe products for multiple device development. It was a very much code once deploy many adventure, with the emphasis on Mobile development. The device and applications which were showcased were exceptional with platforms ranging from the Ipad to Google TV, it looks a very exciting time to be involved in the Adobe community.
And so onto the sessions, the amount and diversity of these were impressive with additional unconference labs it was sometimes hard to decide what to go into. I had set my schedule before arrival and used the Max Companion mobile app to coordinate my time. I found the sessions and especially the BYOL labs to be very well prepared and presented, the only critcism I may have is that not all sessions advertised the level required, some were basic introductions which sounded more advanced. I know a lot more for next time of how to plan what to attend.
I was incredibly impressed with the overall organisation and presentation of the conference with a few exceptions … COFFEE It was really difficult to get coffee during the day, without a trek to Starbucks. The community pavillion was excellent with the device lab, sponsors stands, it was great to meet RJ from Effective UI. and the unconference talks, which were really good. I found all the staff at the event to not only be helpful but friendly, polite and easy to approach. So a big thumbs up to the organisation. I may have gone on a bit about the content but that was not the conference at fault more myself for scheduling the wrong itinary.
So what was the really good, and the bad, well the BAD, each attendee was given a Droid 2 and Google TV, fantastic. yep, but you only get the TV to be delivered to a US address and the Droid 2 can only be used as a phone in the US. It will make a great development device though.
The GOOD well, incredible venue, excellent facilities the way they catered for 4500 people for lunch was superb. The biggy for me though was the meeting of people I had maybe emailed or followed on twitter. James Ward, RJ Owen, Jon Campos, Doug Winnie, Lee Brimelow, Kevin Hoyt , Christian Cantrell to name just a few also the community team and evagelists and lots of attendees. All of these people were great to talk to and all willing to share their experiences and knowledge.
Will I go next year, well that depends on two things, if I can afford it and there being no European event. It is well worth going and the experience way exceeds the cost in time and money.
I wonder why this feels a really nice piece of software. It is easy to use and does exactly what it says on the tin.
OmmWriter works efficiently to allow the creativeness of the writer to flow from their fingers. Although it is still in beta and only available for the Mac the interface and background music make a really enjoyable writing experience.
As I play with the few settings, different font styles and size. The writer gives me a really nice italic font which makes the written word even nicer to enjoy on the screen.
With different options for the sounds from the background music to the key press a nice tranquil and relaxing environment is established. This is of course if you select the correct music, I found changing the background music had a dire effect on my brain activity. (Some would say what brain activity).
The only major drawback I can see at the moment is that it is only available on the Mac. I would really like to use this on my netbook, especially when travelling.
The OmmWriter has no frills no red lines for spelling mistakes and a simple save facility, you can’t even create the text into a web page. It just gives an environment to allow you to write.
Here is what OmmWriter say about spell checking.
“Ommwriter does not offer an in-built spell-checker. However, we have been told that you can enable the spell-checking feature of your Mac to work together with Ommwriter. How? Right click on the text box, choose “Spelling and Grammar >> Check Spelling While you Type”. This will underline misspelled words, using your system settings language”
I personally prefer to type and then ask the system to spell check the document. Well at reasonably frequent intervals. Being on the Mac though you have the full spell checking options.
After you have written the content it is easy to open in a text editor for inclusion into any other editing software or blogging tool.
In review an excellent piece of software, simple, easy and a pleasure to use. I am sure the people at OmmWriter would agree.
http://www.ommwriter.com
Enjoy.
