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

Now we can code


Let's talk about the user interface first.

The user interface

For this application, the user interface is pretty straightforward. As mentioned earlier, we will need to create one view per page, and then delegate the display to the PageFlip component.

Of course, everything has to be contained in a window, so after opening the app.js file and deleting all of its content, we create a standard window using Ti.UI.createWindow with Interactive eBook for iPad as its title. We also store its reference in the win variable for later use, as shown in the following code:

var win = Titanium.UI.createWindow({
    title: 'Interactive eBook for iPad'
});

Importing the PageFlip module

While installing, the module might have seemed complex; using it, on the other hand, is quite simple. Once a module is installed and configured for a project, we can invoke it just as we would invoke any other CommonJS component.

var PageFlip = require('ti.pageflip');

Thereafter, every time we need to refer to the PageFlip...