Janty has had something similar for a while, their Mid series. Hook it up to USB and you can program it in all sorts of ways, save/load profiles, change the puff LED colour to any RGB value, etc. It even has a joystick(!). http://www.janty.com/en/mid-series
Same! And I'm sure the reason it didn't take that long with getting good at it, was it hurts like hell when you do the 33% thing on a couple large projects, when you're on your own.
Been going at it for a couple years now with consulting and freelancing. I've finally gotten good at hitting my estimates. What worked for me was to keep strict time of everything (shoutout to toggl.com, love it!), so I could learn from my mistakes.
The trouble is now though, my competition seems to be underbidding me, but in reality they're providing those ~33% estimates they will never realistically keep, while I'm at ~100% estimates. Not really sure how to relay that to clients. One of the many reasons people like me need a salesperson in front, I guess.
There's a slight learning curve, but it's overall very nice to work with. Been making a living from it for a year now, so I'm rather comfortable with it.
You have to get in a kind of different mindset than with HTML, where you use div's for everything - here you create windows and views - but shouldn't take more than a couple days to get dangerous with it :)
There's a few quirks though - differences between iOS/Android for a small number of things, when coding, which can take up a lot of your time to troubleshoot.
An example of such an issue can be on Android, an imageView which you've applied rotation to, suddenly appears to be not rotated, if you put a backgroundColor on it as well as rounded corners. The fix here could be to use a regular view instead, and use a backgroundImage. Thankfully those kinds of weird things aren't as plentyful any longer, the company behind, Appcelerator, are in my experience pretty helpful and fast with bugfixes.
Maybe it's due to the phrasing of the question. I certainly prefer native (ok semi-close-ish native, I use Titanium), but I _will_ in the future prefer to be using HTML5, once it's ready.
HTML5 isn't ready yet in my opinion, as it takes too much effort (read: hours, money) and many workarounds to get a polished, fast and responsive app out of it to rival native. Sure it's awesome for fast prototyping, but it's still too hard to get "dat native feel".
I'm curious in how you put Titanium next to PhoneGap (Disclaimer: I may be reading too much into that, or not understanding your meaning - 2nd language etc.).
My experience with Titanium is that you code in js or Alloy, then when building and deploying, you get native code, with native elements and everything.
Comparing it to PhoneGap, which purely runs in a slowish WebView isn't quite fair I think. Or has your experience been different?
Very, very informative, thank you. I too have been wondering about this exact thing - if it's worth the trouble in the end, to do server checks and whatnot. Seems it's not, in these cases :)
He's serious, and so am I. Trains go on rails, so a driverless car can go many places trains can't. Can't wait for it to become reality either. Like in Children of Men, but with time better.
Edit, a source, well, says 4 leaks: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-29/sweden-sa...