Thursday morning the class starts. I’m interested to find out a lot more about Titanium. It looks like a good product but there are some “flaky” things I couldn’t pin down that bothered me. The class was run by Kevin Whinnery from Appcelerator. Kevin does a nice job – it was a very good presentation, overall I left learning and knowing a lot more about the product.

One of my big concerns was the Titanium Developer. It just seems almost ready but not quite. Come to find out that’s what the other developers thought also. The class was full, about 24 I think. 6 or 7 where there because they’re going to be trainers in other cites/countries. From what I could tell a few had already published apps with this tool or others. The downside to that was that the class moved pretty damn fast – 3 days would have been much better. Also that was based on the fact that there was an assumption that you knew much more about Java Script than “an understanding”. I think the word Deep would have helped quite a bit. That was the only rough spot I hit – I use Javascript daily but the generally the same sections of the language repeatedly. It’s more of an adjunct to my daily use than a mainstay. The class assumed more of a mainstay knowledge.

But in holding to my theory that if you’re a real programmer it’s a matter of syntax of a particular language not learning or re-learning programming, I spent a lot of time with my Google look up handy. That and the fact that my day is usually spent in front of three 21″ screens on a pc and here I was with a single screen MacBook laptop and it’s flat chicklet keyboard, the splat key, on my useuall keyboard I use the left side of my rather big hands to hit the control key, and bitch and moan and complain some more ….

In the first 15 minutes of the class Kevin demos starting a new app. And sure as crap he gets to the app id line and says “Any string of characters can be put here”. Bull shit. I had to raise the issue that you can just put any string of characters there – it had to have a “.” in the name or it won’t work. He didn’t know that – only be cause he never tried putting anything else in there with version 1.5.1. It was just a habit to use something.something.something. I still want al the hours I wasted because of that back. Period.

One of the people I met at the class – Nobel Edward from Consona, very nice and interesting person, was able to very the period problem along with some variation of letters and numbers don’t work as expected. Later in the day we walked through what was happening behind the scenes – Appcelerator mobile is a blanket running various scripts connecting sdks. In one section I noticed that one of the Android  sdk calls expects a particular notation for the name of one of your modules – you guessed it – in the reverse whatever notation – com.zaks.thisismyappname type format.

Overall it was worth attending. With something like this you pick up little things that you probably wouldn’t get on your own – or it would take a good amount of time to run across them.  You also meet some of the people behind the scenes and get an idea of where they’re heading and why.

And now I am proudly one of the first Appcelerator Titanium University Certified Developers. And yes, I did get a T-Shirt.

My Appcerator Univirsity T-Shirt

leon …