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 we get our hands dirty


As with all our previous applications, we need to have a clear vision of what we need to accomplish before digging into the code. Our multiplayer game will rely on a central game server and every game client will connect to this same server. Communication between the two will be bidirectional, since one player's actions must be perpetuated to all the other players, creating a richer experience for everybody.

Some things to be considered

Online multiplayer games usually transmit and receive quite a lot of data. But on mobile devices, this can quickly become a problem since we can never be sure of the reception quality. A game might perform well with Wi-Fi, but crawl to a stop over cellular data connections. Furthermore, cellular networks are much less reliable depending on where the user is located. This is an important mobile principle. Many new mobile developers sometimes learn this the hard way.

Such use cases and their limitations require us to be mindful about...