Question

I’m looking for a desktop publishing platform for Mac, Windows, and Linux that is closely tied to PhoneGap in terms of the concept. I know that there’s Titanium for Desktop (TideSDK?) but as far as I’ve used it before, it requires the end-users to download a big 70mb-ish runtime file once. What I liked about PhoneGap is that it doesn’t require any of that (it works out of the box). I’m looking for something similar, only, instead of being meant for the mobile development, it ‘s targeted at desktop application development.

Perhaps I failed to mention it but if you are not aware of what I’m specifically talking about, I’m talking about an environment of sort that will let me code via an HTML base and output a native for said platforms. Both TideSDK and PhoneGap does this.

Answer 1

I would highly recommend giving TideSDK another chance, I have developed large, data driven applications on it in the past, and deployed to OSX and Windows and have personally been very satisfied with it. Also, it is now an open source project managed and maintained by a very good team with some oversight and help from Appcelerator (the original creators).

Theyre are two benefits to TideSDk as I see it:

1. License – TideSDK is open source licensed under a liberal Apache 2.0 license. As opposed to QT which is under the restrictive GNU Lesser Public, and commercial license.
2. Power – TideSDK allows you to leverage native API’s (like phonegap) but access them in your favorite programming language (well, choose between Ruby, PHP, and Python). Your only options with QT are C++.

As for what you said about the 70MB runtime, this is not true, I built the runtime in with my last project, and the binary I gave to my clients (OSX) was only 15.3MB.

Hope this helps you come to a decision.