Situation
Jeff Gilfelt is an independent software developer based in London, England. His experience has been in building public facing websites as well as corporate backend development for various clients within the UK and Australia.
Like many web developers, Jeff was interested in expanding his skills to include mobile application development. Since he had ten years of Java experience, creating a native Android application was an easy choice.
A movie buff, Jeff was a long-time user of the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) which provides a wealth of information about millions of movies. In addition to providing names of actors and plot summaries, IMDb has extensive information about where movies were filmed.
“IMDb has all this rich content, but it’s pretty much of a web 1.0 resource. There were no APIs, and it didn’t allow for any location searches,” explains Gilfelt. “It was the perfect content to combine with the location capabilities of today’s mobile devices to create a really cool geosearch app.”
Titanium eases iPhone development
Using his Java skills to build the Android app was fairly easy, but developing for iPhone was another story. “I had been wanting to develop an iPhone app ever since the SDK was announced. But trying to learn Objective-C felt like hitting a brick wall.”
Like most web developers, Jeff preferred a more agile and familiar development cycle than that offered by Cocoa and Objective-C, so he looked to Titanium as a potential solution. He downloaded Titanium on a Saturday morning, and by Sunday night he had a functional prototype of his Location Scout app for the iPhone.
“I was learning Titanium at the same time I was developing my first iPhone app, and the learning curve was amazingly quick,” he says.
He found the support in the forums to be a key to success, receiving answers to his questions within a couple of hours. “I would even get quick responses on a Sunday! Answers didn’t come just from Appcelerator staff, either; the community members are very responsive.”
The Future of Titanium
“Developing Location Scout for iPhone using Titanium proved to me that this was a production ready and App Store friendly solution that I can use in future client development offerings.” says Jeff. “Titanium offers a compelling value proposition to my clients because their in-house web developers already understand the technology. This means they can easily make future updates and enhancements to the applications I build at very little expense.”
