I am glad to announce that Posty won an award! You might know I am an Adobe student rep for Rich Internet Applications. A while ago I submitted Posty to the RIA application contest. Now I received the notification that … I won!
Here is a screenshot from the Education Developer Center.

Thanks Adobe!

Air is Adobe’s proposal to build Rich Internet Applications by means of Html/Js, Flex or Flash. There are alternatives and one caught my attention since a while: Titanium. It is still in a preview release stage but it showcases good features and possibilities. For example the clone of Tweetie built on Titanium is a stunning demo.
Since I suspect that memory consumption will be a problem for every ria SDK which aims at being crossplatform, I had a look at the Tweetanium application in the demo section. Downloaded, installed and loaded three timelines: home, friends and replies. I did the same with Posty.
Below is a screenshot comparing memory consumption.

I am aware it is a shallow approach, but Tweetanium is much more hungry than Posty, in spite the fact that Tweetanium supports just one service (Twitter) whereas Posty includes Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr, Friendfeed and Identi.ca. That said I list few items which can help to contextualize the comparison:

• Disclosure: I am the author of Posty, though I think the comparison is pretty fair. Anyway I am open to criticism.
• Titanium is a prerelease version. It can improve.
• The Air framework is a bit ‘older’ than Titanium, probably more time has been spent to improve memory consumption
• Posty’s memory usage has been optimized, whereas Titanium (I think) has been built to show how easy is to build a Twitter client with the SDK, so probably not much effort has been put in optimizing memory consumption.
• Air’s is made by Adobe, a company. Probably this means more money and time invested in a project (though I am clearly aware that more money does not mean a better product)
• The comparison regards only memory consumption. I am sure there are many other aspects that can be put on the table before saying “this is better than that”.

This is why I think this post has just to provoke a discussion. I will be glad to hear your opinion.