Book Image

Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium

By : Christian Brousseau
Book Image

Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium

By: Christian Brousseau

Overview of this book

Smartphones and tablets have really changed the technological landscape over the last 3-4 years. Much like the web did in the last decade, these powerful tools have changed the way people communicate and access information. Such a wide market creates opportunities for developers who have the skills to develop mobile applications. "Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium" is a practical, step-by-step guide to building iPhone, iPad, and Android applications using JavaScript. This book will give you a solid grounding of the dos and don'ts of mobile development and also covers a lot of the functionalities offered by the Titanium platform. This book begins with a look at what the Titanium platform has to offer. By taking you through clear tutorials on developing each application step-by-step, it helps you to apply your newly acquired knowledge afterwards. The difficulty level gradually increases along the course of the book. Each application from this book covers different aspects of mobile development. Every chapter starts by defining the application's features as well as the user interface structure. Every single code section is then explained and put into context allowing you to gain a clear understanding of their purpose and functionality. The book takes a “small milestone” approach, allowing you to actually run the application and see the progression. Every step is accompanied by many screenshots so you can see the expected result on screen. You will learn everything you need to know to develop your very own mobile applications. The book takes a laid-back approach to Titanium development and provides information in a way designed to never overwhelm the reader with information and also uses clear diagrams, screenshots, and tips throughout.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Creating Mobile Apps with Appcelerator Titanium
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The map (before we code a single line)


Now that we have our game engine in place, we can start building our world. All this is not done by code. It does not mean that it is not feasible using only code, but the amount of work would be too much. Therefore, we will be using graphical tools and assets to achieve our goal.

The right tool for the right job

As we have all probably realized by now, Titanium Studio does not provide any toolset to edit video game maps (if it did, it would have been surprising). Therefore, we will be using a dedicated tool called Tiled map editor, or Tiled for short.

Tiled is a free tool that was created by Thorbjorn Lindeijer in 2008. Since then, it has been made available to the open source community under open source license, which means that we can use it freely for our projects.

To get it, we need to go to the map editor's official website at http://www.mapeditor.org. Then, go to the Download section. It is available on most of the platforms, such as Windows, Mac...