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

Putting the finishing touch


While our game has all the features that we wanted it to have, there are still little things we can add in order to give our game a better appeal. While not mandatory, these improvements are essential when developing world-class applications. Let's go over them quickly.

The user is touching the V-Pad, but where exactly?

While it is true that we give some visual feedback when the user touches the game controller, there is no way for our user to know where exactly he or she pressed the controller. To achieve this, we will be adding a visual indicator that basically appears at the exact coordinates of the touch events.

For this, we will use a small, transparent image with a small particle effect on it, so that it is still somewhat translucent when displayed. We will create a new sprite using the createSprite function and by passing our image path as a parameter:

var vpad_nav = quicktigame2d.createSprite({
    image:'assets/particle.png' });

Since we want this image to...