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

Converting addresses to latitude and longitude locations


Getting our location is all well and good when it's done for us, but humans don't think of places in terms of latitude and longitude values. We use good old addresses to define points on a map. To convert addresses to decimal latitude and longitude values, we can again use the Ti.Geolocation namespace, and specifically a method within it called forwardGeocoder. Titanium has built-in methods for geocoding that utilize and essentially black box the services provided by the Apple and Google Maps APIs. The Geocoding API processes the conversion of addresses (such as 1600, Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA) into geographic coordinates (such as latitude 37.423021 and longitude 122.083739), which you can use to place markers or position the map. This API provides a direct way to access a geocoder via an HTTP request.

How to do it...

Firstly, we need to create some input fields so that the user can provide us with a starting and an ending...