Matthew On...

The Divinity of Christ | The Integrated Catholic Life →

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My current work station.

PhoneGap vs Appcelerator Titanium Round 1

PhoneGap

I used jQuery Mobile JavaScript library together with the PhoneGap Simulator to create some sample apps to test the technology. jQuery Mobile makes it relatively easy for a web developer to create cross platform applications. It supports pretty much all current mobile platforms as it is web based. 

It did not take me to long to figure out how things work and I could create apps quite easily. 

The down side of jQuery Mobile with PhoneGap is that it does not create native apps. The apps looked pretty good but the transitions and the animations were not as smooth as a native app.  There is another jQuery library that is specifically designed for the iOS called iQTouch which has a much better animations and transitions however it is designed to run smoothly only on WebKit based browsers. 

 Appcelerator Titanium

First thing to notice about this product is that even though they say that it is easy for web developers to use their existing skills to build native apps, that is not entirely true. 

This application does not use html, css, js to build apps. They use their own JavaScript API which is than compiled into the individual platforms native code. There is a certain learning curve to the API. It took me a while to figure out how the apps are structured and how to get things to do what I wanted them to do. 

That said once the initial learning curve is overcome the output is pure native apps.  There was enough community documentation and examples to get me going pretty quickly.  Most documentation and examples however deal with iOS. There is iOS specific API calls build into the framework which does not translate 100% into Android platform. If we are going to use this to build apps than it would not be as easy as build once run on all platforms. Modifications would have to be made for each platform. 

The development for this platform was a bit of a pain. Their API documentation is not the greatest.  The debugging is virtually non existent other than printing out info logs to a console.  It takes quite a long time for the app to be loaded onto the simulator and you have to do it each time you make a change in the code.

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The Golden Age

The Golden Age

I started to read this book because I have not read any works by John C. Wright before, and that is a crime.

The first few chapters were so dense and so confusing that I was ready to give up.

This is hard SciFi boys and girls.  This is hard core stuff.

I pushed through and suddenly things started to make sense.  What followed was one of the most awesome books I’ve read in a while. 

(9/10)

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True work of art from my oldest daughter.  She is 4 and super addicted to Thomas the Tank Engine.

"If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies, instead of the land of corpses"

— John C. Wright

Now that I’ve listened to the new Radiohead album few times I still don’t know if I like it.  Here is Lotus Flower for you.  Twitchy and um weird.