fariwinds's Forum Posts

  • jayderyu Thanks. TideSDK users will have to migrate at some point since the underlying libs are aging. TideKit is already substantially better for HTML5 compliance and performance. We work with the native languages capabilities of the device. What you suggest is what we do and make the capabilities available with APIs in JS and CommonJS. As — put it – "show us", and we will.

    We look forward to feedback in future once TideKit trials are under way. I'll try to come back one and a while to indicate what is happening. In the interim, we invite C2 developers to discover more about what we are doing by following us on our social channels on twitter, facebook, g+ or our blog that we are launching this week.

    We are prepared to distribute some free reservations for a handful of devs to gain early access to TideKit on the basis they report their experiences back to this community following a trial. Please contact christian on our twitter channel if this is of interest to you. We'd like a few strong developers here with an established reputation to participate. The game developer community is important to us and I am happy we reached out to you here.

  • shinkan I hope I have explained who we are and what we are doing. Its fair to recognize where we are in our rollout and the credibility we have from our previous efforts. We are only at the start. I have indicated our next steps. Every product has its beginning and entry. Anything new will have its critics. We expect nothing less and the reaction we get to our product will help guide future decisions.

    We are in a competitive situation bringing out a new solution that will work in a way that others don't today. There are some characteristics of our previous work that have gone into TideKit but is a new code base. We expect folks to be skeptical until they see it creating apps. That what our free trials are about when we release.

    Our reservations are there for folks that support what we are doing, who may already know us from our previous work, and want 30 days to use TideKIt as early as possible. We have been building TideKit to end development multiple times for multiple platforms with the goal developers can monetize on a single effort and customers can gain ubiquity across devices with your app.

    Keep in mind we also have APIs to bridge to native widgets for the OS. So TideKit is not simply a HTML wrapper, it is a solution to construct web, hybrid and native apps. We will offer unlimited builds using our build services and folks will be able to deploy for distribution, or a host (or cloud service) if deploying to the web.

  • rojohound Indeed, we originally we inherited Titanium Desktop from Appcelerator when they decided to focus exclusively on mobile. I brought together a team as the lead, and we refactored its code and got it working with all current versions of today's modern operating systems. At the time we inherited the software, it would not run on these. We also brought the project under Software in the Public Interest together with other popular open source projects like Drupal, Debian, and ArchLinux who were also under this umbrella. In Nov, 2012, some time following the 1.3.1 beta release, we decided on a new direction forming CoastalForge and began work on TideKit.

    TideSDK used a custom version of 3 separate ports of webkit. As you may know webkit is one of the largest code bases on earth. So yes, TideSDK would have been slow because webkit was in need of upgrades. Because we decided on a different and broader direction for mobile, web and desktop, this did not happen in the open source codebase. That said there are still folks that use it and the 1.3.1 release is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100,000 downloads.

    With TideKit, we made the necessary investments to the latest ports of webkit and we are constantly moving to stay close to the trunk. We also optionally build with chromium/blink as well so that we can continue to have App Store access with Apple's native port and highest possible HTML5 compliance . We customize webkit and chromium/blink for our product. Our APIs across platforms are consistent and we're maintaining compatibility with our TideSDK APIs to allow folks to move to something much faster and compliant.

  • Fimbul I appreciate your reply. Our blog is the next milestone for public visibility and communication. I hope it will speak to your issues. For us, it will be the start of some broader communication with developers that will goes beyond the limitation of tweets. In my defense, I am not simply a company rep, I am a working, breathing, programmer and CEO of CoastalForge Inc, the company behind TideKit. CoastalForge is a Federal Corporation in Canada. I am project lead and developed TideSDK originally along with others. We've been actively developing TideKit since 2012 and are now bringing it to market. We developed and also supported TideSDK and helped companies with their apps and our community of users prior to this. Today, we are completely focused on TideKit and it will offer our TideSDK users a path to upgrade when TideKit is officially released.

    In TideKit, you code for client and server in CommonJS and can use existing node.js modules or component from the components.io registry. To date exceeds 70K packages of functionality. As you will have seen from TideKit we have already developed a solution for multiple desktop platforms. Our vision of how developers could develop, was broader than this and we've been developing a new codebase from our experiences with TideSDK. This has extended the code base to mobile and web. So this encompasses a spectrum of operating systems and we have APIs to bridge these.

    In our province of Nova Scotia, CoastalForge with TideKit was identified in the top 25 companies of 2013 in Innovacorp's i3 startup competition. We are here building a product. We are a small team, these efforts take time, but you will see the results of our work and more communication from us.

  • Hi Tom, I entered my forum name rather quickly and reversed a couple of letters, my name should be 'fairwinds' but cannot make this change in my profile. Can you help. Many thanks.

  • SgtConti, Thanks I will do that. The other possibility I see for C2 and TideKit is for Scirra to transform its software expand its reach on more devices. Windows, Mac and Linux and on tablets at least. Currently it is Windows dependent but I would be willing to bet this would open more possibilities for its creators for alternative software distribution and to grow a wider audience for game development.

    This is where TideKit could fit beyond becoming an alternative wrapper for packaging and distribution. I see that one of its core targets are students. Tablets in schools are becoming more accessible than desktop machines. We worked with a company in the past who's primary product was stop motion animation for students in schools where their existing product was very successful on tablet.

  • On a lighter note, I messed up my forum name, typing it too quickly I guess when I set it up. My handle is fairwinds. Not able to correct it in the bb. Not sure if there is an admin that could correct it or not.

  • teacherpeter I appreciate the kind words. The immediate possibility I see for C2 is for TideKit to serve to wrap and package your apps. Folks were doing this with our TideSDK for desktop. Unfortunately the webkit there was aging and we decided to put all our effort for upgrades and a broader multi-platform approach with TideKit. Don't you think it would be better to use one tool than multiple tools for mobile, web, and desktop.

    We are up to date with all our webkit ports and now have builds for chromium/blink. Because TideKit can build against the native webkit on mac, reaching the AppStore with appropriate entitlements is possible for desktop. The other possible integration is to use our APIs together with C2 APIs to bring native capabilities into your games that go beyond HTML5 capabilities.

    We'd be happy to make believers of this community. I've not yet met Ashley, but together, perhaps we can give away a few reservations to some folks that would be prepared to report back or blog about their experience with TideKit once they've had a chance to experience it. It would also give us a chance to open up more communication with C2 users to ensure we have a product that will fill your needs. That's the offer I would like to make.

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  • SgtConti, I will seek out the Chan thread and reply. We also have a number of folks in the TideSDK community waiting for TideKit for some time. This is also really also their upgrade path and many folks there have been more than patient as we have been moving forward. You will see our blog up next week as we look to do a better job to communicate with everyone. We also have a tag for TideKit on StackOverflow for questions. If folks need any immediate answers, twitter is something we respond to fairly quickly.

  • Fimbul To explain, the happy faces are supposed to be those of your customers. This is just symbolic, and we use a stock image there to show smiling happy people.

    We are working to achieve ubiquity across devices so that with a single effort in your project code, a customer gets a great user experience moving from device to device. That is all we mean. Folks move between their devices throughout the day, their desktops, phone, tablets, tv and they are never almost on the same OS.

    We wanted our platform page to read like a story with a beginning and an end. An introduction from design and concept through to the deployment story. In the end we want folks building apps and reaching as many folks with their apps as possible. This is important for your own monetization and so that you have happy customers as opposed to those asking you when you are going to be ready with your app on the device they use.

    On the multiple OSs. Its is not always easy with what we work with to maintain compatibility with the older operating systems. Many folks are not on the latest and it is important for us to show that when you build, you can still deploy and run on these.

  • SgtConti On integrating C2, we have not had any discussion with the folks behind it to date. TideKit is really a core that can dynamically build up a runtime to execute the code on an operating system. When a developer wants particular functionality, you configure it simply in a .json file similar to a node project.

    You tell our build system what platforms to build for and it will compile the code and generate the app complete with an installer for the operating system.

    You will see integrations with a 2D and 3D libs for game development in future and perhaps not that far away. Besides native functionality, you have any functionality available in node modules and components. There are already fairly solid libs in pure JavaScript as well as native code for game development. The number of modules of CommonJS functionality folks have access to is now over 70,000 modules today.

    We have discussions with an number of folks that create apps of almost every kind, and have a number of existing relationships as a result of TideSDK. Our first goal is just to get our platform out there and then expand on its possibilities and potential.

  • SgtConti Hmm. If you can point me to the conversation about "Chan" I am happy to comment. What do you mean about the multiple OS versions? We have compatibility with older versions of the OS back as far as XP at present on Windows and on current Windows 8, we now support Mavericks on OSX and we are not working with Ubuntu 14. Keep in mind this means you can still distribute and have your app run on older OS versions. Hope that helps.

  • — The way our system works there is that when folks make a reservation, it displays their first name, country and the status of their reservation. We have folks that know and have used TideSDK from all over the world that know who we are as a team. TideSDK was featured in blogs and articles in countries like Germany, France, China, and many more.

    They signup and their name is displayed, we don't change these things. Our system just makes a request for last 30 reservations in our database, displays the first 6 and our animation runs the fetched data in a cycle. That is all there is to this. Thus far we have a good cross section of folks from all over. If you want to test the functionality yourself, sign up and you will see your name in the rotation.

    On our reservations, it may not be as obvious as we want, but important to distinguish that folks with reservations get a full 30 days without cost whether they sign up for as an early bird or pioneer. Trials will be always be free for TideKit. but they will not be so long.

  • — Hello. No problem with the skepticism. I think if I were reading about us, I might be also since we not communicated as much as we want just yet. Its been a bit difficult with the smaller team. Christian is typically on our twitter channel to help folks. It's sort of a crazy balance for us along with the development work load and the blog is next for us because we know it is important start talking more about the technology and showing folks what it is and how it goes together easily to make apps. We are putting a lot of effort into the structure of apps for this approach to apps come together quickly and feels familiar.

    We were actually around before node-webkit with TideSDK and there are several things about TideKit that are much further along. More importantly we cross web, mobile and desktop. We have more apis for more native capabilities on the desktop and our packaging systems are more advanced. We also integrate with node but not in the same way as node webkit. That said you code in CommonJS to get the most from TideKit.

    We are using latest ports of webkit as well as blink. So this will allow folks to distribute to the Apple app store if building with the native webkit. If that is not so important to you, you can build for highest HTML5 compliance with builds on current blink/chromium. We are current to date on all our browser ports and move quickly to keep our underlying browser ports up to date.

    Can you point me to this other discussion. We are behind on our communication and we've been quite busy. I am not aware of all conversations. I am really into code pretty much each day. I have no issue speaking about anything we are doing.

  • Sorry the urls I posted to the links to the Slideshare and recording of my talk at the conference were removed from my post. Not enough reputation yet to post external links. You can find them by searching for TideKit or Reinventing Native App Development for Multiple Platforms.