In what ways do you think AppC can improve?

Hello.

We (as community) have unique opportunity to make suggestions to AppC on what we would like to see improved. So, you can write your own opinions here and your suggestions could become reality some day.

What I mind the most is a lack of feedback and information from AppC towards whole community, but also to individuals who contribute in some manners.

I believe that we all want to know AppC's future development plans because we depend directly on them (OK, sometimes that can be business secret, but sometimes it is not). For example, removal of "Ti.include" in the future and leaning towards CommonJs standard should be announced officially and on right time so we can prepare. Some people here are developing really large apps and having information about AppC's long term future plans is very important. Also, I believe that we (or at least the most talented people from community) can help AppC with future development plans and make future features more useful for all of us. Since we develops real world apps (and have real world problems), I believe that we know what things could be better or useful.

From my personal perspective, I miss feedback when I suggest something or report some bug (any feedback is better than none). For example, I reported this bug: https://jira.appcelerator.org/browse/TIMOB-5303 and had no idea will it be resolved, when it will be resolved or how it will be resolved until it actually was resolved. I also make suggestions like this: https://jira.appcelerator.org/browse/TIMOB-7671 and I would like to know if that idea is OK, could it be better, are there technical limitations that prevent that ticket to be implemented, etc. It doesn't have to be resolved, but I would appreciate technical discussion. Or just say it's stupid and mark it as invalid. :)

That's all from me (for now), you can make your own suggestions and hopefully something will come out of this. :)

Cheers, Ivan.

Many good developers thinks that Q&A section should be improved and this has been suggested multiple times in the past (see "Most Votes" section).

IMHO, information that is required in JIRA when opening a ticket should also be required when creating new question in Q/A (that would be huge improvement). Boydlee suggested that there should be moderators that could close questions that are not asked in right way. David Bankier thinks that rewarding system is bad because people will give any answer just to collect some points. As I understand, it's important for AppC that they can see what are the most important issues in the community. Voting system is OK for that cause, but as David noted, that could be implemented in some other way, so people don't just give answers because Q&A points and top expert list (points don't make you expert :) ).

For me, the two main issues with Titanium Mobile are: documentation is often not complete or doesn't contemplate all the necessary details; often components/APIs are not very stable or complete. The impression that I have is that AppC is growing fast, maybe too fast, and as a result it's investing in expanding "horizontally" rather than on improving what it has already. Personally I'd prefer fewer features, but more dependable.

As a final note: command-line tools are poorly documented and/or not very user-friendly, and building/running/deploying from CLI is essential in many production environments (continuous integration, automated build, ...).

I will say yes it needs a terrific makeover. As i come from iOS background and when I compare my development experience on both iOS and titanium.. there are time when titanium fails. Interface builder is the main issue. Appcelerator should also make some low level API also that will make the development process more easy, more intuitive.

Hey Guys,

Just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Mark Aronica and have recently taken on what we call the "Customer Success" group which includes the Consulting, Training, and Support organizations. As a result, systems such as Q&A fall under my team. So I'm very interested in monitoring this thread and hearing how we can continue to improve the experience for developers.

We're working hard on enhancing a number of the interface points with our community including Website, Q&A, and other Support assets. So this is a timely discussion and know that I'm documenting all suggestions and will be bringing them into the appropriate design discussions.

Thanks again for taking the time to contribute you're thoughts and feedback on how we can continue to improve your experience.

-Mark Aronica

Having some knowledge of Q&A systems and communities, my suggestion would be for AppC to endorse the starting Q&A section on Stack Exchange just for Appcelerator. Please see that page for additional information and to leave answers/comments.