Book Image

Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook Second Edition

By : Jason Kneen
Book Image

Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook Second Edition

By: Jason Kneen

Overview of this book

This book will take you through the process of building cross-platform, native UI applications for the mobile from scratch. You will learn how to develop apps, how to use GPS, cameras and photos and how to build socially connected apps. You will also learn how to package them for submission to the App Store and Google Play. This cookbook takes a pragmatic approach to creating applications in JavaScript from putting together basic UIs, to handling events and implementation of third party services such as Twitter, Facebook and Push notifications. The book shows you how to integrate datasources and server APIs, and how to use local databases. The topics covered will guide you to use Appcelerator Studio tools for all the mobile features such as Geolocation, Accelerometer, animation and more. You’ll also learn about Alloy, the Appcelerator MVC framework for rapid app development, and how to transfer data between applications using URLSchemes, enabling other developers to access and launch specific parts of your app. Finally, you will learn how to register developer accounts and publish your very own applications on the App Store and Google Play.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
15
Index

Detecting whether another iOS app is installed

In order to work with other apps, they must support a URL scheme. In its simplest form, this will allow you to detect and launch the app. More preferable is if the app supports URL scheme commands, allowing you to send instructions or data to it. There are a plenty of resources out there for doing this, including http://handleopenurl.com. On this site, you can look up particular apps and find out whether they support URL schemes.

As a general rule of thumb, most modern-day iOS apps support URL schemes by default, allowing you to launch them either with the app name (appname://) or by their full bundle identifier (com.mycompany.appname://).

In this recipe, we're going to use a very simple bit of code to detect whether another app is installed using the URL scheme. Ideally, you would want to do this on a device, but you can test it with the stock simulator apps along with your own apps.

Getting ready

To prepare for this recipe, open Appcelerator...