I didn't try Fries, but I tried using PhoneGap for prototyping and found that building such a web app is not much faster than building one in XCode (and I was a web developer for nearly 15 years!). So why bother?
Another problem is that if I want to build prototype in your framework, I must learn its conventions (what was that CSS class again, "buttonnormal" or "button-normal"? Since the web frameworks can't really compete with native apps in terms of user experience (behaviour of UI elements differs from what user expects), I will have to build in Objective C - which means I have to learn both iOS programming AND your framework.
Granted, such a tool would be useful if UX team wants to build prototypes and they only have web knowledge - and you have a separate team for building a final (native) version. Other than that I fail to see a point.
I would love to be proven wrong though. :)
BTW, my comment doesn't apply to Titanium which basically produces a native app (but I don't use it for other reasons).
For getting a proof of concept together, and for early stage testing on multiple platforms, you can't beat html. As you mentioned Titanium and it's competitors have some challenges, that honestly, HTML just doesn't have.
That isn't to say that every app should be an html app, just that in early the early stages, if multi-platform, levaraging of web developers (rather than finding app developers) is your goal, a tool like this can be very valuable.
I see a huge flaw in your understanding of Fries. You mentioned Xcode and Objective C in your comment but the whole point of Fries is to prototype Android apps on HTML, CSS, and JS.
Fries aims to make creating Android apps/prototypes easier. If that doesn't apply to people who finds that doing it on Eclipse UI Builder is much easier then Fries isn't for them.
If that doesn't answer your questions, hit me up with another comment. :)
Cheers!
Why would you use that only for prototyping and not in production?
I'm already thinking of putting up a tutorial on how to integrate it with PhoneGap. So let's all hope that comes out soon. Cheers!
(If its there,via didn't see it on nexus7 4.2
