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

We need an engine!


While we could use standard views and image views to create our graphics and move them around the screen, this approach would be problematic in many aspects. The first one would be performance; even when it's empty, a View is still a pretty heavyweight native component. Another aspect would be related to animation and visual effects. While Titanium provides us with functions to stretch, rotate, move, or even animate the images, such functions are not well-suited for high performance graphics.

Therefore, we will rely on a native game engine called quicktigame2d. This engine will provide us with the functionality that we expect from a gaming engine.

It includes features such as:

  • Game view and scene management

  • Sprites and transformations

  • Animations

  • Maps

  • Particles

We will go over most of these items throughout this chapter, but for now, all we need to keep in mind is that the game engine is basically a native module. This will give us the ability to manipulate low-level graphics from...