Re:Show HN: Our first iPhone app, built entirely in JavaScript
by trabianmatt on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @10:19PM
(#3592849)
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.
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.