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

Before writing any code


As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Titanium does not provide any means to give a nice curly effect to the pages while swiping our finger across the screen. There are two ways around this:

  • Develop the desired effect using JavaScript by playing with canvas, rotations, and animations. Such an approach would require some fairly complex code and there is also the risk that the performance may be poor depending on the use cases.

  • Use a piece of software that uses native code to achieve the desired effect, but still allows us to use it with JavaScript, similar to other Titanium components such as Button, Label, View, and so on. This piece of software is a called a Titanium Native module.

A native module

When using a framework, there will come a time when you will need more than what it has to offer. This may happen progressively as you use the framework more often. The engineers behind Titanium, keeping this in mind, allowed the developers to extend Titanium using native code...